


The Four Thrones

by Classpectanon



Series: Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [23]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: (That Means Sex Is Referenced But In A Humorous Medieval Fashion During Conversation), Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Banter, Blood, Blood and Injury, Canon-Typical Violence, Cooking, Elaborate Fight Sequences, Epic Bromance, Fantasy drugs, Found Family, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's A Little Like Dungeon Meshi, It's Also A Little Like Monster Hunter, Magic, Marijuana, Military Training, Monsters, Nonbinary Character, Ribald Humor, Slice of Life, Weapons, Web Serial
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:23:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 64,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28933974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Classpectanon/pseuds/Classpectanon
Summary: Or: A Knight-Errant, a Naive Squire, A Brusque Tinkeress, and a Snarky Wizard walk into a bar, start a bar fight, proceed to get kicked out, and then accidentally topple the burgeoning empire of a corrupt politician or two before going on a vacation with some monster-slaying.Featuring literally as many Homestuck characters as I can fit.UPDATE SCHEDULE:LATE EVENING ESTMWF/ EARLY MORNING ESTTThSaOCCASIONAL DOUBLE UPDATES AS I HAVE THE GUMPTION FOR IT(Technically 23/365)
Relationships: Dad Egbert & The Signless | The Sufferer, Dave Strider & Karkat Vantas, Dave Strider/Karkat Vantas, Dave's Bro | Beta Dirk Strider & Dave Strider, Dirk Strider & Grandpa Harley | Beta Jake English, Dirk's Bro | Alpha Dave Strider & Dirk Strider, John Egbert & Dave Strider, John Egbert & Jade Harley & Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, John Egbert & Roxy Lalonde
Series: Three Hundred And Sixty Five Ficlets About Homestuck [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2085684
Comments: 13
Kudos: 32





	1. Chapter 1

"Oi! Tosspot Egbert!" The Knight-Errant yelled, stretching a hand up into the horizon with the dipping sun behind it, like a halo on a finger-puppet for children. Perfectly befitting the sort of strange week John had been having. The week, of course, as you may know, dear reader, was begun by an attempt at a drinking contest rebuffed by the fact that, as a 19 year old, John Egbert did not find it appropriate to drink. It wasn't as if Sir David E. Strider (knighted by Her Excellency of Derse herself), also 19, found this a particularly compelling excuse, but a person had their reasons and he would respect that.

"That's not very nice." John replied, sucking their cheek between their teeth in a show of disapproval. They pursed their lips up and made a silly face in the general direction of Sir Strider, who flipped them the Queen's Eagle, a complex hand gesture involving your thumb, middle finger, and pinky extended towards the heavens. It was a very rude thing to do, especially to someone you had spent a week challenging to various forms of bar game.

When one looked at Sir Strider, the thought of such a man being knighted much less making anything of himself seemed vanishingly unlikely. He was a scrawny beanpole of a human being, with cardinal-red hair hidden under a thorough layer of brick-red cloth, a more thorough layer of rusted, cheap-looking plate, and then a final coif threaded over his shoulders. More striking, of course, was perhaps the one thing he was known for: a massive greatsword that, if intact, would easily be the kind of blade used to split both a horse and its rider in a single deadly stroke.

If intact.

It was, in fact, snapped cleanly in half through some method that Sir Strider spun a separate yarn for whenever pressed. No matter how frequently or fervently he was pushed for information regarding the clean cut splitting his blade in twain, he would never give you a straight answer, but when you saw it in combat, you soon stopped doubting whether or not such a man was worth of the reputation he earned as one of the fastest hands in Derse.

And with those fast hands, half-blade strapped to his back, he kicked at the dusty ground of the little mountain village he had ventured all this way to best Knight Egbert at. When the drinking contest went through, an arm wrestling contest was held - John won, handily - then a game of checkers - Dave - then a boar-slaying contest - John - and finally, a drinking contest, of water, which Dave did in fact win, startling most onlookers (who knew of John a voracious appetite and thirst, particularly for a good glug of spring water). They left the record 2-2 when Sir Strider decided it was time to move on from this quiet little hamlet and onto greener pastures. His purse grew empty and stomach light, which mean that it was time to go somewhere more populous and stride the bounty boards for some time.

"It's been a very fun time, truly." Sir Strider said, with an indeterminate amount of sincerity, as Knight Egbert approached, warpick in hand. Unlike Sir Strider, John looked more readily built for combat, with shiny, new platemail (inherited from their father), a broad stance perfect for striking (inherited from their father), an intricately smithed warpick (inherited from their father), and a general knightly aura of valor, also inherited from their father. Father Egbert, the literal, was the Court Paladin of Prospit for quite some time until his untimely demise at the hands of Becquerel Black, a lupine brigand of some renown, still at large. John, ever the prodigal child, tempered their desires for vengeance with an even hand, despite the urging of their fellows.

By today, the trail of Becquerel Black had gone bone-cold. And that was okay, John had a life to live, irrespective of the lack of respect they received from those who considered themselves the compatriots of John's father. "But, duty does, in her ever-encroaching orgy, call. I have my life, and you have yours. Fare thee well!"

Sir Strider's voice had an air of unrecognizable melancholy about it, and John, behind their ruffled hair in short, messy spikes, didn't quite recognize the need for the tone. As far as John was concerned, Sir Strider had undoubtedly despised them, as was evident in every motion and request to prove himself against John's skills. Just another wastrel looking to compare themselves to the child of Father Egbert, to see if they could best the inheritor of the Prospitan will. And they could, somewhat frequently, and they could not, almost just as frequently. "In her what?"

"Ever-encroaching- you know? Actually, let's just pretend I didn't say that. I've called a wagon, they should be arriving before nightfall, and, assuming you stay here, or do not follow directly, this will likely be the last we see of each other. It was a pleasure to meet you, in some regard." Sir Strider answered, taking a couple of steps backwards until he was technically out of the bounds of the village, and sitting down on the firm dirt and thin, narrow grasses of the mountain region.

John sat down next to him. "And you plan on waiting by your lonesome, Sir Strider? That seems awfully ill-advised of you. There could be bandits out here in the woods - or worse, wolves!"

Sir Strider rolled his neck and head in a way indicative of rolling his eyes, although it was difficult to see through his narrow metal visor clamped firmly over his actual peepers, revealing only his mouth and the lower half of his nose (alongside the off-orange scruff that passed for his beard). "I will plant my butt here and wait until the wagon arrives, and not spend a minute more in this accursed town, nor will I burn my eyes any further with its hoary inhabitants--"

"It's _what_? Sir Strider, I believe you are mistaken, the brothel--" John intercepted, actually for real kind of concerned this time, as opposed to the fake concern they typically used when messing with people.

" _Hhhhhhhh_ oary, Knight Egbert. Aitch-Oh-Ay-Arr-Why." Sir Strider explained, starting his sentence off like he was about to hawk a loogie. "It means white, old, wizened. Wrinkly. The hoary people of this village, with no energy, verve, or drive."

"What was that? That thing you did. Aitch-Oh-Ay-Arr-Why -- what was that?" John asked, derailing the conversation yet again with their legitimate curiosity and slight concern for Sir Strider's mental state.

" _Spelling_?" Sir Strider asked incredulously. "Excuse me, Knight Egbert, I mean not to offend, but are you _illiterate_?"

"Yes." John replied, grinning smugly. Sir Strider reached up to mime pinching the bridge of his nose, only succeeding in dragging the flats of his fingers across his metal visor, his nails making an unseemly scraping noise against the rusted material. "I spent my childhood days learning the way of the sword, the hammer, the warpick, the axe, the bracer and gauntlet, holy magic - which I failed to absorb. We didn't have time for books, that sort of thing was left for the scholars. Did _you_ have time for books?"

Sir Strider tilted his head in John's general direction, as a nonverbal way of indicating confusion. John tilted their head back, clearly confused. "You never learned how to read?" Sir Strider asked, in blunt disbelief.

"No! Is that an issue? Can we not be friends if I'm not capable of reading your erotic poetry, Sir Strider?" John asked, clearly under the mistaken impression for some reason that Sir Strider was a fan of theirs. He was quick to disabuse that notion.

"No, we cannot, I'm afraid. Only individuals with sufficient literacy to consume my most tasteful mountains of erotic poetry are fit to become _my_ friends, Knight Egbert. I'm afraid you are simply not fit to task. We will have to remain as bitter enemies, forever embroiled in the most painful of personal holy wars as we--"

"Okay, so, can you teach me?" John interrupted, whip-quick. 

"Please, stop interrupting my soliloquies, Knight Egbert." Sir Strider blithely retorted.

"I don't know what a soliloquy is. Can you teach me?" John repeated, clearly not taking anything other than a straight yes or no as an answer. To be fair to them, however, this was because anything besides "Yes", "No", or, potentially, depending on their insistence, "Maybe" was, to them, not an answer. "Both how to read and what a soliloquy is. You seem like an intelligent individual, Sir Strider, with wit nearly as sharp as your blade--" "Hey!" "I would like to be taught these basic skills that I have clearly lacked in the proper education to learn! Assuredly, a skillful knight such as yourself is up to the task?"

Sir Strider sighed. "I've only paid enough coin to transport me and my luggage. Plus, I have no use of another mouth to feed on my travels. While I'd love to catch you up on all the finer things in life that your sheltered suburban tutelage withheld from you, I simply do not have the resources available to me." Sir Strider said, internally unable to decide whether he actually wanted to take Knight Egbert under his tutorship or not. It was a slightly tempting idea, to be known as the one who taught the son of Father Egbert everything they knew about the arts, performance, humor, jestership, but on the other hand, it would require putting up with Knight Egbert for even more time, and Sir Strider was not so much a louse as to leave a sentient being, even one in distaste, in the wilderness.

"Oh, that's okay, I'll try to pay for myself. I've the coin." John offered, reaching into a pocket and withdrawing a small cloth sack, jingling with currency. "Prospitan lucre. Unsure of the exchange rate to your Dersite coinage, but it should be enough for the wagon operator? Plus, I've seen your hand in combat, and I believe we may be able to make mutual usage of each other."

"Mutual... Usage...?" Sir Strider replied, slow, ever-slower, drawing out each word, and John's face filled with blush, shaking their head vigorously.

"No, no no, no no no, not in that fashion. I am not the kind to fancy men, fortunately or unfortunately depending on the asker." John frantically replied, waving their hands about in the air like a panicked child. The kind of flailing about that... Actually, we'll leave what it means to you, dear reader.

Sir Strider quirked an eyebrow, albeit one aware of its invisibility behind steel visor. "Assuredly."

John looked away, coughing twice, loudly, to clear the air. "Assuredly. But I digress! While I would certainly enjoy your company, and make well use of your intellect in teaching me how to read, write, perform the skills of basic literacy, et cetera, I actually am not a leech in this arrangement! Or at least, I would not wish myself one."

Sir Strider leaned back, resting his palms on the ground. By now, the sun, already low in her flight, was beginning to descend below the horizon, a steadily sinking egg rotting in the sky, painting the auroras a pale green, bright red, intermingling colors of Gods and Goddesses in the sky above. Then, in an instant, with both knights watching closely, they vanished, the minute of intermingling between the mortal and divine realms per week thus ceased, leaving the sky in starless orange, rapidly fading to black.

It was, as far as sunsets went, a very pretty sunset.

"Right, and what will you be doing for me that makes this arrangement a fair, equitable one? I am no usurer, mind, nor do I desire to become one - I find the field infinitely detestable, for the presence of accursed mathematics that confounds the brain and stymies the senses. I... intensely dislike mathematics." Sir Strider responded, after enough time had passed that he could see the wagon slowly approaching in the distance. Until then, it was quiet silence, neither one of them willing to say anything to break the wall of emptiness that had sprung up between the two. "I digress."

Sir Strider slowly rose to his feet, dusting off spare bits of gravel and stone from his rear end, his legs, and his palms. "I want to make something of myself. Beyond "the child of Father Egbert, in peace may his spirit rest"." John began, staring into the distance, eyebrows furrowed, eyes narrowed. They grabbed their warpick and pointed it towards the deepening horizon - a challenge to the heavens, and the pendulous divinities they carried, strange caprice under the watchful eye of Egbert. "There are monsters to be slain! Dungeons to be explored! Bounties to be drawn! I am John Egbert, and I wish to be the child of Father Egbert no longer!"

Sir Strider chuckled at the little speech. Oh, how he hated the simple movement of it, the way that John's passion ringed so clearly in their every sentence and motion. There was no training for acting that could produce this kind of emotion, the pure sincerity of an individual who had never learned how to lie or hide themselves from the world outside of them. Sir Strider could feel every ounce of truth in John's words, and laughed, reaching up to clasp his helmet in one hand as his guffawing echoed through the mountainsides.

John looked hurt, letting their warpick drift down to the ground, pointed tip dragging a small line into the dirt. "Well... I suppose it was worth a shot! Fare thee well, Sir--" John began, turning around mid-sentence. This time, however, it was their turn to be interrupted, with a hand clasped over their shoulderplates.

"Egbert. Knight Egbert. You wish to be a vagrant adventurer?" Sir Strider asked, turning John around with a firm grip, the other hand resting on their sword. "Living under the stars, or in inns, never staying home, always searching for danger to be conquered, maidens to be saved, treasure to be gathered? That is the path you wish to take in your life?"

John nodded twice. "More than anything else, Sir Strider."

The other knight reached his hand out to John. "I'll accept your offer. My life is one of humdrum expertise - perhaps carrying a companion in combat will add some spice to my days and nights!" He roared, his voice increasing in volume to a boisterous crescendo.

John, grinning wide, clasped their hand against Dave's, giving it a rough, firm shake. "Let's provide the spice then, yeah?"


	2. Chapter 2

The wagon's wheels gently ambled along the unpaved grass trail, winding its way through the safest portions of the mountain paths, lead by four particularly well-made looking horses and a friendly looking man with a very large hat and particularly short stature. The covered wagon, protected by the elements of nighttime with a narrow tarp, provided more than enough shelter from the chilly air that John and Sir Strider weren't shivering much. That being said, John couldn't help but worry about the seemingly unprotected wagoner, scooting over along the wooden seating so he could chat them up a little more.

As it turned out, in the dark of night, Sir Strider wasn't much for conversation. After helping the man gather his belongings from the inn, Sir Strider was mostly mum. Too dark to read, didn't want to light a candle in a dark wagon, the moonlights not penetrating the canvas much. He stared out the back, brooding quietly, watching what he could of the landscape as horses clopped on ahead in a continual trot. John wished there were cards to play, or some other activity to do besides sitting and watching. They passed a single little satellite village in the dark about an hour through the travel, but the churning windmill at night presented nothing but an idle curiosity to be gawked at by John.

"Are you cold at all, Sir Wagoner?" John asked, scooting closer to the front of the wagon so that the man could hear him.

The short, squat figure turned a friendly head towards John, his voice pitchy and nasal but otherwise with a pleasant melodicity to it. "Please, call me Deuce, I've not been knighted quite yet!" He joked, clapping his sausage-like fingers together with a jolly little grin. His face was covered in a thick patchwork of grey and black hairs, a bushy moustache and even bushier eyebrows, baby blue eyes almost the same color as John's. "And don't worry about me one bit! I've got blankets a plenty, I'm just sitting on them!"

John looked down, to see a neatly folded stack of blankets indeed being sat upon, giving the man a not insignificant lift in height. Oh, he did appear to be even shorter than at first glance, probably a good couple of inches smaller than the already-small John, if they had to guess. "And do you sleep? Surely, you must take a break at some point." They asked, innocently enough.

"On occasion! We'll probably stop at a couple of places along the way to refuel and rest, and I'll take a little nap. I'm much more of a night person, personally! Rise with the moon, go to bed with the sun, and all." Mr. Deuce answered, cheerfully enough, a ringing little chuckle filling the air. John shrugged quietly, their question answered, and began slowly removing their armor from their body, plate by plate. Unlike Sir Strider, John had very little luggage to carry besides the possessions they had acquired from the Prospitan court, except a small scroll of holy magic they couldn't read, and whatever food they were carrying at a given moment. Today, it was an apple, given by one of the locals for helping return their cat from the top branches of a tree. And that apple was already consumed, so, traveling light!

"Right, well... If there's any assistance you'd need, feel free to request?" John asked, un-strapping buckles until they were free of the heavy, uncomfortable fit of their father's ancestral armor.

"Aye, will do. Sleep well, Knight." Mr. Deuce replied with a pleasant little wave. John scooted back over to the back of the wagon (so, a couple of feet) and immediately kicked their body up onto the entire seat of the wagon.

Considering its narrowness, this did not work, causing John to immediately spill onto the floor, banging their leg against one of their greaves. They could hear both Mr. Deuce and Sir Strider turning to look at them, waving both hands in the air frantically. "I'm fine, please, no need to worry. Calm thyself."

"If you say so..." Sir Strider muttered, arms folding back over his chest. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking at waking hours, the construction of his armor and hood hiding most all of his facial expressions beyond his mouth, but at night, it was a practical impossibility. If there was any genuine concern in his voice, it wasn't concern that was going to be detected by watching the flicker of startlement in his gaze, the way his eyes puckered into a wince, or really any concern that'd be seen in the dark. His tone was even and moderate, much like his keel.

John laid back on the floor of the wagon carriage, slowly scooting themselves up with their feet so they could at least watch the sky pass by overhead, the ruby and emerald moons dancing around each other in their eternal waltz. Some scholars said that in several thousand years, the two moons, in "decaying orbit", would crash into each other. What actually would happen then was some advanced, dark sciences that John didn't have the wherewithal or understanding of mathematics and chemistry to even begin attempting to learn. Plus, there were still people who said that it was preposterous, that we have written record of the twin moons orbiting each other for aeons, and they would never overtake each other, kept dancing in an eternal waltz.

Still, it was a thing John liked to think about sometimes, when they slept, or were close to sleeping. In their dreams, they saw a great, yawning abyss, swallowing not only the twin moons but the planets, the rest of the celestial bodies, ripping crystalline shards from the aether until naught was left but the impenetrable deep of the infinite celestial ocean, and them, in a boat, idly swimming by. Sometimes, these dreams disquieted John, but, kept with them since childhood, they had since grown accustomed to the visions, thinking little else of them. It was just a thing that their heart showed them - John was not much of an adherent to the Gods and their mystic abilities, and dismissed the notions of visions as a fancy for those wishing to dub themselves a person of renown with nothing to show for it.

Sir Strider, apparently, slept sitting up, without removing their armor. John cringed quietly when they heard the snores quietly bubbling from Sir Strider's mouth, barely able to be muffled behind the raised cloth of his coif. For a moment, John thought, "Oh, it must be awfully sweaty and uncomfortable in there,", and then they remembered how cold it was, particularly for someone of Sir Strider's physique, and shrugged quietly to themselves. Then, they shut their eyes, and quietly slipped off into the cold realm of the dreamers.

As usual, John dreamed of the ocean. They saw themselves reflected back in the glass-still abyss, arriving centuries after it has already consumed everything else. There was no armor, no weapons to fight battles against nonexistent enemies with, only a long, blue hood that swept to the skies above and the bright, unceasing sun, a blue robe more befitting a magus of some kind than someone like John. They waved a hand, and the water began to swirl beneath them, churning up islands, castles, landscapes, until they had brought the entire world, empty, bereft of life, back from beneath the consumptive brink.

And then, they wandered. Semi-familiar locales, blending together into an indistinct dreamscape. They recognized the Queen's chambers of Prospit, the storytold halls of combat where, centuries ago, the Prospitans and Dersites slaughtered each other in indiscriminate war. They walked from the battlefield to the study to their father's grave, to cabins of witches they had never met, buried within stone-barked forests, a well in a swamp. Like life had simply disappeared, leaving only the foliage and landscape to remember it by. They spent much of their dream wandering aimlessly, attempting to read books but finding only smudged illegibility, unsure if due to their lack of knowledge or the dreambound land they resided within.

John was very much aware that they were asleep, as they always were.

That's how they knew it was not prophecy.

John woke up as the sun rose, wiping exquisite sleep from their eyes despite the stiffness of their back. They arched up, stretching, rolling in every which direction, as the wagon slowed down to a gentle halt. A rough little sit-up brought John from laying to sitting, and then some more finagleing of the limbs brought John from sitting to standing, and then, realizing that they were still in a wagon, back to sitting. Then, upon realizing that the wagon was stopped, they looked around. Sir Strider had already roused, rolling his presumably stiff limbs in large windmill circles. "Morning, Knight. Sleep well on the floor?"

"Sleep well sitting straight up?" John shot back, reaching down to begin shuffling themselves back into all their armor, like a hermit crab returning to its long-lost shell.

"I was keeping watch for brigands and ne'er-do-wells, you best hold your tongue." Sir Strider replied.

"You _snore_." John drawled, rolling their eyes as they fit their chestplate back on. "Wait, is the trip done, or...?"

"Nope!" Mr. Deuce replied helpfully from the front seat. "I am taking my little napsie. You two are free to cavort around the village an hour or two, and then we'll be off. One more stop between here and there and then we'll be in Alekhine."

"Alekhine... That's neutral territory, is it not?" John asked.

Sir Strider responded with a nod and some words. "As are most towns alongside this mountain range. Are the subjects of history and geography not your strong suits either, Knight Egbert?"

"No, not very." John replied, grinning toothily. They stopped strapping their armor on, and instead, began removing it once more, leaving them in their underclothes rather than looking more prepared for combat.

"Are you not going to join me in the village?" Sir Strider asked, hopping off the back edge of the wagon, adjusting the grip of his sword.

John shook their head. "No, I think I'll be fine." They said, before reaching into their coin pouch, pulling out a single coin, and flicking it at Sir Strider, who snatched it out of the air with ease. "That being said, would you be able to grab me some apples?"

Sir Strider chuckled. "I'll see what I can do." He said, waving a hand back dismissively as he walked away.

* * *

The entire time, John, relaxing in the back of the wagon to the rhythmic "Hookhhnnnn... Snzzsnzzsnzzsnzzsnzz-mimimi-mew" of Mr. Deuce's apneatic snoring, half-expected someone to come running, shouting out of the village. "Help, we are under attack by gigantic beasts, and only a skilled warrior or knight can save us! Please come and put your considerable amount of martial skill to use by bashing a big monster's face in until it leaves us alone!" - but the moment never came. Obviously, John was relieved that this purely invented scenario that they had come up with just then and there never came to pass, but the truth of the matter was that, despite knowing of their existence, John had never seen a monster before. They had been told many stories, of course, and they wished to do battle, similarly of course, but John's experience with combat was purely of a theoretical sort.

So, John was quite pleased to see Sir Strider return with a satchel full of apples, having spent a considerable amount of time staring at the birds fluttering around the wagon. "Got your meal, Knight Egbert. Did not know a human could subsist themselves on purely apples, but here I am, being proven wrong yet again. A frighteningly common occurrence these days, it ashames me to say." He snarked, tossing two apples towards John, who completely fumbled them, letting them drop to the floor of the wagon carriage. Still, no reason to waste a perfectly good apple! John took them, polished both of them up, set one in their lap and started working on the other one while Sir Strider walked around to the front of the wagon.

"Say, I don't see any apple trees around here, where exactly did they get these?" John asked, hefting one up into the air for Sir Strider to look at despite, presumably, him having seen them on purchase. It was bright red, shiny, but a little small and perhaps even the slightest bit wrinkled, nothing like the ones they had for John at home, in the palace- ex-home, John. They were still getting used to the fact that they had fled, and that the roads and inns were their home now. Sir Strider ignored John, feeding each of the horses an apple, one at a time, before returning to the back of the wagon carriage with the rest of his loot in tow, slinging it onto the floor and pulling himself back up.

"Do you know much of the field of "Economity", Knight Egbert? The knowledge of commerce and trade?" Sir Strider asks, sitting down on the seat and untying a knot around one of his neatly-bundled luggage satchels, to let it fall open.

"I thought you despised both usury and mathematics?" John asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Oh, indeed, I do, but there is more to Economity and its studies than simple mathematics - there is the philosophy, as well, the theory." Sir Strider says, pulling out a large tome of completely unintelligible text that John simply could not make hide nor hair of.

"I cannot say I do. How does this relate to apples?" John asked, tossing the core out the back of the wagon, where it would hit the ground and, perhaps a couple of hours from now, be consumed by the insects and birds, rotting into the ground, continuing the circle of life. They started work on the second one, digging buck teeth into tender skin, appreciating the crisp snap of the flesh beneath. Of the apple, despite how much this may sound like something more grim.

"The villages in the Kriegspiel Mountains--" Sir Strider explained, pausing for a bite himself, "exist in a loose association, tied together by trade of mutually needed goods. You have wood. Your neighbor has meat. You need meat, your neighbor needs wood, so, you trade until you both have the amounts necessary to perform the functions necessary for life. Or, for some, you trade for luxuries, like small clockwork trinkets."

"And what about coinage?" John asked, leaning forward, more interested in this than, by all means, they should be. "How do coins fall into this equation?"

"Eugh. Please do not say the word "Equation" to me." Sir Strider responded, making a disgusted face. "But an excellent question: coinage is worthwhile because the metal it is made of is valuable, and represents a large quantity of goods. A single gold coin can, for example, buy an entire satchel of apples, but weighs far, far less."

"So everyone will carry around coinage as a way of representing, sort of... "I have this much stuff!", rather than keeping all their goods with them?" John asked.

"That is about the long and short of it. Would you rather carry all these books, or a couple of coins worth approximately this many books, that you could then exchange as necessary?" Sir Strider asked, rhetorically. John nodded along, getting the gist the best they could. "Right, so there is a small little nameless town near the foot of the mountains that was built around a single man's orchard. Several of the towns along the mountain have planted some of his apples, but, for the most part, their supply comes from him, and they exchange to him a rather large quantity of coinage, which is required to pay tax to the local lord, and the rest of which can be used for whatever he fancies. Similarly, each town has things they produce that they sell to the other towns, exchanging coin between them, with the occasional reintroduction of new currency into the econosystem coming from out-of-towners, like you and I."

"Wait a moment, tax? What exactly is tax?" John said, shaking their head in confusion. Dave's face curled up into an uncomfortable expression, a bit like a wince in slow motion.

"Tax is a fine levied on sentient beings for living under the land owned and managed by a lord or lady. You must pay to, in this case Lord Halley, a certain amount each season, and if you do not then the lord's dogs will repossess some of your goods until they make up the difference." Sir Strider elaborated, although his facial expression was falling in a way that suggested he didn't really want to be going down this line of inquiry.

"That seems... Immoral." John replied quietly, after a moment of thought.

"I refuse to comment." Sir Strider responded in kind. "Economity is a complex field, and perhaps some day after you can read this tome, I can teach you the ins and outs. Who knows, perhaps you may find yourself a wealthy landowner some day, and we will be able to discuss the morality of tax systems in finer detail then. Until then, you should not bother your head about it."

There were a couple of minutes of uncomfortable silence as Mr. Deuce's sleep interrupted itself in fits and starts. Eventually, he sputtered awake, removing the hat from his face and replacing it where it should be, on the tippity top of his bald head. "Right, then! Have everything we need, fellas?" He asked, tilting his head backwards.

"Not a fella, but yes-" "All clear, Mr. Deuce- not a fella?"

John waved their hand in front of their face dismissively. "Let's not talk about that right now, please."

Sir Strider shrugged, adjusting his hood and shifting his gaze so that he was staring once more out the back of the wagon. "Right! To Alekhine!"


	3. Chapter 3

The rest of the trip to the town of Alekhine was as uneventful as its first half, although that didn't necessarily mean it was unenjoyable, per se. The rest of the afternoon was not filled with the activities of merriment, as neither of the two adventurers had a deck of cards, or any other means of generating enjoyment outside of the things on their backs. Yes, there was nature to observe, in all its magnificent abundance, the hares and crows and wolves and, when stopping by that second little hamlet, a stray cat. The moons continued their eternal dance overhead, day and night, slowly dancing their nearly synchronous orbits overhead, always providing the slightest measure of moonlight to see by, even in the darkest of evenings.

There wasn't much chatter. Oh, yes, the occasional ribbing to be had, particularly as John snatched away one of Sir Strider's many textbooks and found it impossible to consume with their eyes, the letters all blurring together into an indistinct morass. Oh, how that received the slightest of knightly japes passed back and forth, where John found, once again, the ease at which Sir Strider could be riled up by referencing his tendency to sleep both sitting up and in armor. Apparently, it was not just a habit for wagon rides.

The town of Alekhine was recognizable from a distance, and not just because of Mr. Deuce's excitable "There we have it... Friends!", apparently having come up with a suitable replacement for "Fellas!" after a polite request from John, following its second usage. The other two little villages they had stopped at could barely have been called villages, with the first one being "3 and a half cabins surrounding a windmill" and the second one being "four and a half cabins surrounding a larger watermill by a river", but Alekhine? Alekhine was recognizable at a glance.

Too many houses to count offhand, an inn ("The presence of an inn always signifies a healthy local economic status, Knight Egbert."), a small farm attached to the town's rear end, a butcher, a baker and brewer, this place truly had it all. What was the crowning feature of the town of Alekhine, however, was more than just the buildings comprising it, but something much more intriguing - the gigantic cannon emplacement, originally built to defend the neutral territory during the Third Prospitan-Dersite War from siege drakes. Cold-wrought iron, three massive, stone crushing wheels, two stiff, forward-facing barrels, and enough complex engineering to make anyone even remotely smarter than John's head spin. They did not know much of Alekhine, but even they knew of Alekhine's cannon.

"Thank you very much for the ride, Mr. Deuce! I appreciate it ever so much." John said, reaching out to shake the short man's hand after emerging from the back of the wagon cabin, all coated in armor like a beetle's new shell after a molt. Mr. Deuce smiled and nodded, shaking John's hand with a surprising amount of grip strength for such a diminutive fellow.

"The pleasure is mine, Friend Knight. I take it the two of you will probably be staying in town for a while?" Mr. Deuce asked.

When Sir Strider's voice emerged from behind John's ears, they jumped almost completely out of their skin, landing back on the ground wit a loud clatter of polished metal. "Almost assuredly. Alekhine has the busiest bounty board in the Kriegspiel, so we'll be spending our time here making sure that Knight Egbert is capable of doing more than lifting their hammer in a fight and then likely be moving on."

"Rude!" John replied, tapping Sir Strider's faceplate with the back of their gauntlet twice. It made a nice, very pleasing ringing noise that made their hand vibrate for a second or two. "Yes. We'll be staying in town for a while." John answered, reaching into their satchel and withdrawing two Prospitan coins, pressing them into Mr. Deuce's hands.

"Oh, you've already paid, did you forget, Friend Knight?" Mr. Deuce asked, confusedly, pushing his hands back towards John.

John shook their head left and right slowly. "Consider it additional payment for services rendered. That's what it's called, right, Sir Strider?"

"Most civilized sentients call it "a tip"." Sir Strider snarked from behind the wagon, dragging their many bags of luggage out and gently depositing them onto the grass. "You've got another one on your shoulder."

"Oh!" John shouted, before noticing their own volume. "Oh." They said, grabbing the two silvery Dersite coins stuffed in between their shoulderplate and their under-clothes and pushing them into Mr. Deuce's hands as well. "Here you go, Mr. Deuce! For you."

The enthusiastic little wagoner looked like he was about to start crying. "Thank you so much, Sir Knight and Friend Knight. I will never forget this kindness!" Mr. Deuce replied, stuffing all four coins into a small little purse and tucking it beneath his pile of blankets. After an overenthusiastic wave goodbye, Mr. Deuce turned their head back. "Got everything you need there, Sir Knight?"

"Yeah, I've got it all. Fare thee well." Sir Strider responded, grunting with effort as he scooped one bag up and hefted it over his shoulder. "Egbert, come over here and earn your keep."

"Carrying your luggage, of course?" John replied, slightly incredulously, as they tied the strings of their coin satchel to their belt.

"Yes. If you want me to help you become the wandering vagrant knight of your dreams, you will have to show me that you have the necessary degree of physical strength required." Sir Strider answered with the kind of smile typically reserved for coprophagiacs.

"I walk around in full plate armor, brandishing a warpick, is that not sufficient?" John asked, beginning to walk over anyway. They had a slight feeling that they would be carrying bags anyway.

"Of course not, I've hefted your weapon - it's barely ten pounds. My blade is heavier, and it's snapped in half." Sir Strider retorted.

"Horseshit." John replied, even as they grabbed a bag and slung it over their shoulder as well, leaving the third on the ground for now.

"Indeed they do." Sir Strider answered, and as Mr. Deuce whipped the reins of his horses with a flick of the wrist, the two of them began the ignominious work of trudging towards the inn, bags in tow. Quickly now, Mr. Deuce disappeared over a nearby hill, his horses following the well-tread dirt path into the distance, where he'd likely find some other town to park in, and some other set of adventurers, or even rather ordinary travelers, to drive around to their intended destination.

The central square of Alekhine was not anything particularly out of the ordinary, unless you counted the gigantic cannon anchored firmly to the ground of the town square to be "out of the ordinary", in which case, you could consider Alekhine's town square to be slightly out of the ordinary. That being said, it was more a fixture than a weapon intended for active use, judging by the playing children allowed to crawl all over it's thoroughly bricked up inner workings, turned into an ornament for decoration. Hopefully, it would never have to be used again. A couple of supervising adults, mostly mothers, gossiped by one of the nearby houses. One of them pointed to the strange pair entering town, and their gossiping intensified, mixed with giggles.

"You think they fancy us, Knight Egbert?" Sir Strider said, mid-adjustment to the grip on his bag of books.

"I would hope not. I'm not much for being fancied at the moment." John replied, brusque and flat.

"Pity. Have--"

"We're not going to finish that sentence if you value your throat being intact, Sir Strider." John interrupted, all cheer and smiles, their pick at Sir Strider's throat in a most sudden manner.

Sir Strider raised a hand in deference, waving it about until John lowered their pick. "Alright, alright, alright, point taken, no talk of fancies for Knight Egbert. Plus, they're probably all taken women already, so this sort of speculation wouldn't be very much of worth for you."

"Are you... interested in matronly women, Sir Strider?" John asked, biting the tip of their pick with their buck teeth to avoid laughing.

"Yes." Sir Strider responded with a perfectly straight, stone-still face. "I am rather partial towards the most experienced of barmaids."

"What's your limit, Sire? 40? 50? 60?" John asked, both amusedly horrified and genuinely curious as to how deep this rabbit hole of information about their new companion went.

"Limit?"

"Please do not tell me you've--"

"Of course not, Knight Egbert. This is all purely hypothetical. I'm _genuinely_ interested in individuals of my own age, and I'm not thinking about marriage until I've gotten a few monster heads to mount on a wall. Have you heard, pray tell, of "Comedy"?" Sir Strider cut in as the two of them finally managed to haul his luggage to the front doors of the inn. He set it down and leaned against the wall, taking a deep breath, while John rolled their eyes.

"Comedy, yes, I've heard of it once or twice." John answered, as sarcastically as they could muster. "Is this what you call "a jape"? A "jest", perhaps?"

"In some regards, yes." Sir Strider answered, grabbing the door handle of the inn and prying it open. "Roxy!"

"Roxy?"

"Roxy!" Sir Strider yelled again, until a broom found itself jabbing him in the face in a fashion that John felt was most risible. And then another, and another, and another. Out came the most dashing figure that John had seen in quite some time - if John had the potentiality for considering "fancying" another sentient, this "Roxy" character would certainly fit the bill. Bap! Bap! Bap! The broom's handle came down in a well-practiced flurry of blows across Sir Strider's forehead, and then one more jab sent him off his balance and hurtling into the floor.

Roxy had wild blonde hair, perhaps a bit more orange or strawberry or lightish-reddish-brown at the roots but clearly bleached by hours of uncovered exposure to sunlight, in snarled curls surrounding (his? her?) their head, and a round face distinctly similar to Sir Strider's, but perhaps squished a little less taut. Roxy shared Sir Strider's polearm-like height, an inch shorter, perhaps, looming over John, and had the sort of light-but-present musculature expected from a person that spent the majority of their day performing labor tasks, lifting heavy objects, and the like. "Out, damned spot! Go get your other luggage before some carrion beast steals it."

"Fine, fine, I'll retrieve your accursed parcels, witch." Sir Strider grumbled, dashing out of view before his helmet took another swarm of hammer blows from Roxy's broom. With a grip and a little flick, they dispersed dust from their thick, heavy-duty apron, shaking their head to loosen up some of their bouncy curls of hair and then running a hand through to push it back and out of their face. Their eyes were _shockingly_ pink, a color that struck John immediately as one that must be unnatural in some way, perhaps with magick, standing out even further across their tan-olive skin.

"Are you actually a witch, missss..." John began, drawing out the word in case they needed to change it to "mister" at the last second.

"Just Roxy is fine. And no, I'm not - lack the hands for it. Not for lack of trying, though!" Roxy replied, squatting down ever so slightly so that they could be closer to John's height. "And you are?"

"Egbert is fine. Pleasure to meet you." John responded, a little shy-dismissively, waving a hand in front of their face like they were nobody particularly important.

"The pleasure is mine. Egbert, Like the Prospitan Father Egbert?" Roxy asked, leaning on one of the little wooden pillars holding up the roof of the porch, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah, he was my dad." John answered quietly, reaching back to rub the back of their head nervously. Roxy's eyes widened.

"Surely, you jest!" Roxy exclaimed in mute disbelief, her face crestfallen. "Oh, a thousand condolences for your loss - I'm certain one day they'll--"

"Oh, don't worry too much about it. What has happened, has happened. All we can do is continue on, eh?" John cut them off, idly waving their pick in front of Roxy. Then, realizing why their arm hurt, John put down the luggage they were still carrying.

"Very true, very true. How do you know my cousin, if I may be so bold as to inquire?" Roxy replied, deftly guiding the conversation to greener pastures in a way that made John's body relax ever so slightly within its confining armor prison.

"Oh, he tried to challenge me to a drinking contest to prove his superiority over the fabled "Child of Father Egbert", but I told him I didn't drink. He stayed in town a little bit and we performed various other games of skill and ended up with a tie. He brought me along so he could continually challenge me to various contests and further continually lose at them." John lied.

Roxy broke out into tittering laughter. "Oh, that does sound like his sort of one-upsmanship."

"What does?" Sir Strider asked, causing John to jump and nearly hit their head on a lamp. He thumped another bag of stuff down on the ground with the tiniest hint of a smile, one that rapidly faded in moments.

"Egbert here was simply telling me how you continually lost to them in various contests in a strange attempt of courtship." Roxy answered, face cracking into a smirk.

"I wouldn't call it courtsh- hey, hold on a moment! You said I _lost_?" Sir Strider shouted, bonking John with a single rusted gauntlet.

"Yes, four-for-four." John replied, receiving another bonk on the shoulder for their troubles, bursting out into hysterical giggles alongside Roxy.

"As the record stands we are currently _tied_ , thank-you-very-much. Although if one of the competitions were "dirty cheating liars who lie and cheat", then doubtlessly Knight Egbert here would indeed be winning by a very large margin, the scoundrel!" Sir Strider rambled like a mill rolling along the surface of the water during a thunderstorm. "The sheer, raw nerve- out of all the things I do for you and you have to play off to my cousin that I lost at both the game of checkers and, since you refuse to ale or mead, a drinking contest of little but fresh mountain water? I would never lose at either - my wit is unmatched by any blade and I am as thirsty as sentiently possible at any given moment in time. In fact, I thirst now!" Sir Strider continued his elongated rant as he squeezed his way past Roxy and into the inn, until his voice disappeared into the wood.

"Does he do this frequently?" John asked.

"Frequently, yes." Roxy responded, a tight-lipped smirk. "I'll handle the luggage. Do you two need separate rooms?"

"No thank you, Roxy, I'm fine with the floor of Sir Strider's." John replied. Roxy's face, normally high in humorous energies and drive, immediately flatlined into a disappointed scowl.

"I'll get you a room, Egbert." They said, trying not to sound too upset about it.

"Oh, okay!" John replied, offering zero resistance, and shuffled awkwardly into the inn.

It was comfortable and warm inside - warm enough, at least, to make John consider removing some of their armor. Roxy quickly followed suit, hefting one of Sir Strider's bags over their shoulder while the man himself stared at a large board across the way, rubbing his chin. A couple of scattered, round tables were attended to by sentients of all shapes and sizes... Mostly human, though. John did count a single elf! They looked around quietly, towards the front desk of the inn, currently unattended, up the wooden stairwell presumably to the beds, over to the doors that they assumed led to a kitchen, and sort of just quietly walked in as straight a line as possible to Sir Strider.

"Thirst resolved?" John asked, causing them to jump about a foot up.

"Lord and Lady, don't startle me like that. Next thing you know I'll keel over dead and you'll have to pay for my funerary rights. Thirst resolved, I have quenched it with mass quantities of spiced cider and I am now prepared to actually begin productive work for the day." He replied.

"The very productive work at staring at a board of scribbles, yes." John mocked, tapping Sir Strider twice on the back of his helmet.

"...It's a bounty board, Knight Egbert. Who did you think would be paying you to be a knight-errant?" Sir Strider asked, genuine confusion apparent in his tone as he turned his head around, just to peek at John.

John shrugged. "I figured we'd just live off our monster kills or something of the sort."

"I mean, yes, that's part of it, but you do need an _income_." Sir Strider gasped exasperatedly.

"Do I? That sounds like busywork." John teased. "I'm catching your goat, Sir Strider. Tell me what it says."

"Wh- Oh, right. Well, I could likely sweep all the assignments on this board with no issue whatsoever." Sir Strider answers, gesturing to them with a flourish. "Right. Likely." "But I believe we should start with something more suitable for the average of our skill levels, yes? There is an infestation of imps in the basement of the local brewery. They are unable to retrieve their stock without putting themselves at risk to life and limb."

"Imp meat?" John asked, sticking their tongue out, enunciating each syllable with as much force as they could muster.

"We can just sell anything we don't need to the butcher, you know." Sir Strider suggested.

"Oh, that's a good point. What's the reward?" John asked, leaning against the wall, looking at (and failing to read) the bounty board.

"8 gold pieces, and a stout." Sir Strider answered. Turning on their heel, John immediately began bolting, drawing the attention of everyone else in the inn (including a slightly frazzled looking Roxy).

"Great, you keep the stout, I'll handle the coinage. Tally ho!" John yelled, pausing for a moment to lightly push the front door open (avoiding everyone's gaze in the meanwhile) and then vanishing out the door.

Reaching underneath his visor, Sir Strider pinched at the bridge of his nose before following behind shortly thereafter.


	4. Chapter 4

John's head poked around into the brewery, ignoring all the many people staring at them as they dashed so valiantly, and slightly childishly, from the tavern all the way to the brewery. Well, not quite from the tavern to the brewery - first, they had to stop for directions, and ask a very pleasant looking lady where the brewery is, and she said she didn't drink, so they had to ask _another_ pleasant looking lady, and that one was more than willing to tell John where the brewery was. Then, they went, knocking on the door twice before pushing it open, not even waiting for Sir Strider to catch up. There was adventure to be found! Bravery! Combat! Who cares about waiting?

The front door opened to reveal a small, quiet, smiling woman, a large bandana used to tie her hair back into a messy little bun. "Oh, my! What brings a knight like you to a humble brewery like this, Sir...?"

"You can just call me Egbert, please, ma'am, not a Sir. Yet to be properly knighted." John answered, putting one knee down on the ground so they could kneel politely to the woman, holding their warpick firm in their free hand while the other one came to rest on top of their leg. Then, they stretched back up into their full height, popping their back. A trudging set of frustrated, semi-angry footsteps behind them alerted John to the presence of Sir Strider, this time not making them jump twelve feet in the air. "I've heard you've had something of an imp problem, in your... basement?"

"Oh, yes! Dreadful creatures. They're making it impossible to get to the barrels down there, making things pretty perilous - We'd be willing to share a not insignificant sum of our profits with you should you be able to get rid of them!" The woman explained, cheerfully, gesturing down to a rotted, dusty looking set of cellar stairs, descending deep into a dank, dark, dirty depths.

"Pop quiz, Knight Egbert! What do you know about imps?" Sir Strider shouted, pushing through John and elbowing his way out in front before stepping in past the woman (albeit in a much more friendly manner). His sword hefted on his shoulder, he went and peered down into the cellar beneath the main building of the brewery, cupping a hand to his ear so that he could hear the scrabbling more clearly.

"Nothing, Sir Strider!" John replied, with a big, dopey grin on their face. Sir Strider turned to them with an exasperated, weary grin, lifting his visor up for just a scant moment so that John could see his incredibly tired, blood-red eyes, and then letting it fall back down onto his face, banging his nose. "Do you think that's bad, Miss?"

The brewer couldn't decide whether she wanted to laugh or blanch a little bit. "I won't make a judgment call, but I think your companion might not be having a fun time of it!" She settled on, her voice wobbling into some kind of indecisive alto tone. "I'm probably going to go... Erm... Sit outside, while you two take care of this?"

"Yeah, that sounds great!" John agreed.

"What's your policy on property damage, ma'am? I want to know just how much we are allowed to destroy all of your essential brewing goods and furniture in our epic quest to defeat a few little goblins." Sir Strider asked, leaning against one of the large vats, some sort of odd smelling liquid sitting in the inside of it. "A single casket of your finest mead, or three? Or anything goes, so long as we perform the slaying with skill, valor, and a minimum of injuries?"

The brewer looked at Sir Strider kind of funny. "...No. Please try to avoid damaging any of the barrels. Do you... Actually, yes, just please try to avoid damaging the barrels. Your pay will be deducted for each."

Immediately whirling on his heel, Sir Strider pointed his flat blade towards John. "You hear that, Squire Egbert? No breaking things!"

John gave off a goofy little jester's smile. "No need to tell me-- wait, squire?"

"You are functionally my squire, are you not?" Sir Strider responded. John tried to think of an argument, but they were, in fact, a squire when they were learning how to become a proper knight in Prospit. So they couldn't really come up with any actual reason to contest that.

"Yeah, sure!" John replied, giving a cheerful little shrug. "I guess I'm a squire now."

"Greetings, Squire Egbert!" Sir Strider responded with a loud wave. "No breaking things!"

"I'll break your face, knave!" John shouted, waving about their pick like it was a feather, or maybe a pencil. Then, once they were finished waving out all their excited, nervous energy, they quickly followed up behind Sir Strider.

"You two are certainly an interesting pair..." The brewer sighed, slipping out the door.

"I think she likes us!" "I think you have horse manure for brains." "It's quite possible!"

Sir Strider gave John a quick little bap in the head with the pommel of his blade. "Keep on your toes. We'll talk as we walk."

"Won't that alert the imps that we're here?" John asked, nevertheless following Sir Strider's every footstep down the visibly rotting, creaking stairs. Every step felt dangerous, and once John crossed the threshold separating the cellar from main building, it felt as if the stairs had suddenly gotten _much_ longer, elongating into perilousness, a wide open basement far large than should logically fit under a small building like this, wooden scaffolding arranged in decorative, mazelike, random structures.

"Oh, believe me, they're aware. Listen close." Sir Strider replied, sitting down five steps from the bottom and cupping his ear once more. A couple of steps behind, John did the same, and they did hear indeed - quiet, insect-giggle chittering filling the air in a haunting, slightly annoying symphony. "Pop quiz part two. What do you know about imps, Squire Egbert?"

"I told you, very little--"

"Wrong! Listen closer." Sir Strider intercepts, nudging John with his elbow. "Tell me what you _hear_."

John shut up, and John listened. "Well... Unless it is one very long imp with several dozen mouths, there are many of them. And we're also surrounded on all sides. And they make the most _annoying_ sound."

"Right you are. Do you know why a bunch of imps are congregating in a place like this? Or, before you say "obviously no"," John made a face at that, ", can you hazard a guess?"

"They like stout?" John guessed, shrugging their shoulders.

"...Yes, actually! Imps like alcohol. And confection. They're a common pest, although this is a rather uncommonly large infestation, I must say." Sir Strider mused quietly, rubbing his chin.

"Too large even for Sir Strider?" John asked, grinning all smug.

"Mmm... Yes, probably too large. I'd be mobbed in an instant." "Oh." "Look, what else do you notice?" Sir Strider asked, gesturing in circles with the pommel of his blade.

John looked around, a little stupefied. "Nothing, really. It's pitch dark down here, huge."

Sir Strider slapped the flat of his blade against the stairs lightly. "Exactly. It's far too big to actually fit under this building."

"So the imps dug out some tunnels, is that supposed to be my next awe-inspiring revelation?" John snarked. Sir Strider reached back and effortlessly bonked John on the top of their head with the flat of their blade without even bothering to look. "Hey, watch it! That thing's sharp!"

"Knight Egbert, are you really so sheltered?" Sir Strider asked, although John wasn't able to discern in what sort of a friendly (or not) fashion it was meant by. "How many monsters have you fought in your life?"

John laughed, making the stairs rock gently beneath them. "Fought? Zero. Seen? Also zero."

" _Merde_." Sir Strider muttered. "Must I really explain the _basics_?"

John got up, stretching their back, bending backwards until it popped. They took a couple of steps down the stairs, all the way to the bottom step, flourishing their pick outwards and trying not to fall. "Yes, please, oh gracious Sir Strider."

"Monsters... are magic. There are also objects that are magic. When you have a large quantity of one or the other or both in a semi-enclosed space, it becomes a Dungeon. Or, really, any amount of magic in too small a space. It makes it grow, swell, twist, get angry. Get ornery. It's just a thing magic does." Sir Strider explains like he's talking to a child, also following John down the stairs. As soon as he steps off, onto the dusty floor, he hears an angry squeak from in front.

"How does that work?" John asked, leaning innocently on their pick. A short little imp comes sprinting, screaming out of the darkness, and it is frankly one of the ugliest creatures that John had ever seen. A humdrum combination of seemingly every animal in micro-small combinations, with the body of a very small humanoid and the face of some sort of distorted insect. Large, round white eyes and loud, clicking claspers surrounding a mouth constantly purring out low-pitch chitters and purrs. It had claws, of course, claws that certainly looked dangerous, and teeth, that clacked together behind their other odd mandibles, their outer face seeming to have formed into a natural helmet of sorts.

Some sort of facial covering, almost like a combination of a beetle's elytra and a mask, folded inward from the imp's upper head, forming slightly more "normal" looking eyes and mouth structures, but it was not enough to fool Sir Strider (if it was even meant to fool anyone, and not simply ceremonial, or acting for another biological function). This was not the face of an idle humanoid, or some sort of small sentient, it was the face of a monstrous creature.

Starting low to the ground, Sir Strider bent down slightly, both hands gripping the handle of his half-blade tight. From his lower right hip, he brought the sword up to bare, thrusting it upwards and outwards in a strange moving diagonal cut, before sheathing his blade.

With a loud, hissing deflation, the slain imp quickly split in two from seemingly nowhere. John was no idiot, he could tell when an individual hit someone with a sword, and when they have not, and outside of the oversized gust of wind surrounding him being disproportionate even for a sword five times the size and a man five times the strength, it simply did not appear that Sir Strider's blade actually touched the imp. There was a loud spurt of oily black blood from the imp's rapidly shriveling corpse, the strange facial mask it wore quickly dissolving into a loose powder before being sucked away into the dry dungeon air. "And how did you do that? Most people I know have to actually touch something with their sword to cut it."

Sir Strider turned to look at John only for a moment as two more screaming imps shot out from the darkness. "Answer to question number one: Magic, of which I cannot confidently claim to know much. Ask Roxy instead. Number two: I'm just that good, squire." One imp leapt, and then the other. The first one was knocked away with the pommel of Sir Strider's sword, and that motion was carried into the other one, impaling it squarely through the stomach. Sir Strider reached off and gently prised it off the flat tip of his blade before tossing it aside. "Are you going to help me, or stand their and gawk like a frightened peasant?"

John stepped forward onto the dirt, and heard a loud shrieking sound immediately above them. "Get back!" John shouted, taking three steps backwards from the falling imp, reeling back, and bringing the whole of the flat head of their pick down upon the Imp's head, very cleanly causing it to crumple like tissue paper. Then, a kick away kept it out of the way while a fourth approached from behind. John switched handing on their warpick, aiming the pointy half closely, and then gave it a good, hard swing, nailing an imp directly through the head and sending it hurtling into the darkness. John winced at the very indistinguishable sound of it hitting a cask of fermenting something-or-other. "Wait, Sir Strider - hufffnh! If Dungeons grow in layout and size, where do they get the new material to expand? Do they just... duplicate wood and barrels of alcohol infinitely?"

Sir Strider looked at John for a moment, taking a couple of steps back to generate room between the two before backhanding a flying, fluttering imp with his fist. He shrugged, and made a noncommittal "Iunno!" sort of slurred sound. "I mean I don't imagine anyone puts the treasure chests there on purpose, in the middle of all the deadly monsters."

"There's treasure _inside_ the dungeons?" John asked, eyes filling with a heady mixture of incredulity and greed.

"Almost always. Don't get distracted now!" Sir Strider replied with a smile, swinging around horizontally to cleave the imp it had punched directly in two across the middle. John, turning around, focused on their own fighting, techniques they knew. Pressing enemies away with the tip of their pick, not winding up too much but still giving it a little bit of fall to let gravity accelerate the head. Imps were sent flying, a single smack from the flat end of John's warpick able to send one of them about 4 meters back.

"Hey, this is fun! Has anyone ever invented imp punting?" John joked, as the same imp they had just struck away returned with a loud, broken hiss, its mask hanging from their face, twitching and malevolent. Or, as malevolent as a small little bug-thing could be before it had the business end of a war _pick_ business ended into its head.

"You'll be the pioneer, Knight Egbert. To your flank!" Sir Strider yelled, having to take a couple of middling steps back as an imp almost managed to inflict a scratch with one of its feeble little claws. They weren't dripping with venom or acid or on fire or anything like that, it just sucked to get clawed in the face. He took another step back before kneeing it directly in the mask, and while it was stunned, bringing down its blade in a loud, heavy, vertical slash.

And so, John took a great big wind up, hands wiggling with anticipation, head of the warpick over their shoulder, and when the last imp it could see approached, they swung, bringing the warpick down and sideways like they were trying to hit a ball with it. They struck, square on point, sending the imp hurtling into a barrel full of something. Probably wine. "What's my "flank" mean?" John asked innocently enough, only to get swatted angrily by two imps scratching for their face, chittering and hissing loudly. John spat in one of their faces and then shoved the other one away, grunting with frustration.

Somehow, the one that got spat on stopped moving for longer - long enough for Sir Strider to finish it off, before turning his attention to the very last one personally. Or, at least, the last one if none were hiding.

Sir Strider leaned down into a squat, put his elbows on his knees, and sucked in a long, dry lungful of air. "Oh, that's the spot... How's it feel, Squire Egbert?" Sir Strider asked, with only the slightest hint of condescension.

"Tiring!" John answered, almost immediately falling back onto the stairs. It cracked slightly, but it rumbled loudly, sending a powerful, reverberating little vibration up through the stairwell. "Sorry, Miss Stairs!"

Sir Strider nodded, looking around at the splattered and bruised and battered and sliced imp corpses, and he saw that it was good. "On your flank means on your side. I don't really remember if there's a separate term for left and right side. Either way."

"Yeah, either way, we're done!" John cheered, leaning back onto the stairs and causing them to crack once more, before splitting directly in half. "Ah, shit!" The stomping noise in the distance, however, did far more to attract their attention than broken stairs. "Oh." John muttered quietly, a massive, three-fingered creature reaching itself out from the maze of wooden scaffolds towards John.


	5. Chapter 5

"Remember, no breaking any barrels!" Sir Strider yelled as he dodged out of the way, tumbling into a loose somersault and immediately kicking off the wall to stop his speed.

"What _is_ that?" John yelled, ducking underneath a slow, clumsy swipe that annihilated what was left of the musty, decrepit set of wooden stairs that they had entered the cellar with. Scrambling over their own feet, they turned around and started to run into the dark depths of the cellar Dungeon, trying to stay out of the way of the heavy, floor-shaking footsteps. John ran in the opposite direction of Sir Strider, so when their response came, all John could do was make a bleak, gaunt sort of face of fright, and begin looking for a way around the creature.

It was massive, easily twice John's height, thrice their width, rough head scraping against the surface of the cellar, causing little bits of dust and flecks of wood to fall onto its shoulders. Its fingers were fused together into a thumb curled underneath and two large, grasping fingers over top, set in such a way that they folded into each other when it closed its hands. Skin, an ichorous, leaking dark black, leaving oil-stain'd hoofprints as it ambled along, patiently, cautiously. Two massive tusks curled out from the inside of its mandibles, blindingly sharp, and tattered, cloth-like folds of skin hid most of the strange musculature beneath, giving it the appearance of some sort of robed reaper.

It swung down, reaching again for John as they dove out of the way, in between its legs. Almost immediately, it snapped them shut like a vicegrip on John's foot - they let out a loud scream of pain, and it clenched even harder, slowly reaching behind itself. There was a loud rush of wind, like the sound of a sword scraping against a scabbard, and the tip of the creature's finger was sliced away, revealing blackened, undifferentiated meat underneath, rapidly oozing oily, sticky gunk onto the ground. Two more slashes, and then another two, carved two round gashes into the creature's legs, made it roar out in rumbling pain, made it let John fall onto the floor, where they were quickly scooped up by Sir Strider.

"Ogre. Nasty little imp ringleader type. This is _not_ worth 8 coins, _merde_." Sir Strider muttered, tossing John out of the way before a bleeding fist came down on him, blocking it with the flat of his blade and two hands, skidding back several feet. John limped upwards, cursing quietly under their breath, dropping their warpick and beginning to chant in an ancient, wordless tongue. "What are you...?"

"It broke my foot, shut up and don't interrupt me." John shot, their hands beginning to glow with a white-gold light as they stammered, and chanted, and reached down to grab their foot. There was a loud, "shiny" noise that shot through their armor like a bell, and John grit their teeth together in pain at the sensation of bones being fused back together rang just as loud through their nerves. Underneath their greaves and boots, skin un-bruising itself, blood returning to its veins, turning back the clock on injury until it was like it never happened. Their fingers tingled with crackling, holy energy, and they shook and twitched, sending pulsing waves of pain through John's body. Magic was never easy, particularly when you did it poorly, without having practiced in quite some time.

"Gonna be finished there any time soon, friend?" Sir Strider huffed, dodging clumsy, slow swings from the ogre, occasionally digging a fresh new cut across its torso or hands to keep it focused on him instead of on John. John stuck their tongue out at Sir Strider and blew a raspberry, before scooping up their warpick and running at the ogre with a loud warcry, only to get immediately swatted aside into some of the wooden scaffolding, breaking through at least three planks before settling on the floor in a cloud of dust. "Guess not. En garde!"

The ogre was strong, yes, and resilient, but Sir Strider was quick, faster than anyone in that much armor had any right to be. Every time the ogre attempted to swing or grab at him, he was gone in the next second, and a fresh cut would spurt into action across the ogre's folded, wrinkly skin. There was barely any way to keep track of how he was swinging, the handle just wide and long enough to hold a two-handed grip for ripping across flesh, but every so often interrupted by one hand being used as leverage against the blade's extensive hilt to drive it further into the ogre, like pushing a shovel into dirt. Then, yank it away, disappear into the dust.

John grunted with exertion, their armor clanking against their body as they walked, this time without any triumphant yells, towards the ogre. Thoroughly distracted by a pesky knight carving chunks from their flesh, they're easy pickings for John rearing back and driving the pointy end of a warpick directly into where their spinal column should be, between their shoulderblades. This was a widely decried decision, and historians would note it in the future as a "particularly bad move", as the ogre immediately whipped around to fling John loose from their warpick. They reached behind themselves, plucking it out like a toothpick in their gums, and tossed the warpick behind them with an aggravated grunt. "How in the Lord's name does it survive a pick to the spine? I've been taught anatomy enough to know that most things die to that!"

Sir Strider slowed down for just a moment, hopping up backwards onto one of the barrels to give himself room to catch his breath. "No bones, just a bunch of very tightly packed tubes full of fluid. It's more like felling a tree than killing a beast. You've ever felled a tree, Squire Egbert?" Sir Strider asked, while the ogre looked around dimly, scraping its head against the ceiling as it twisted left and right, looking for squishy humans to kill and eat. Its body was heavily marked up with dozens of shallow cuts and the occasional sharper wedge, most of them carved from its upper arms, with squishy, steadily dissolving chunks of black meat lying on the floor.

"Just tell me where to aim so it stops hitting me and starts dying instead!" John yelled back, scrabbling along the floor to grab their warpick again. Their motion prompted a reaction from the ogre, who blindly smashed at the ground, missed by several feet before beginning to slowly lumber in John's direction. At least, until John ducked behind a barrel of fermenting brew, seeming to disappear from the ogre's beady little eyes. The four diminutive white eyes blinked and looked around blearily, the ogre barely seeming to be aware of its own injury.

"Felling a tree, Squire Egbert! Hit the cuts!" Sir Strider yelled, drawing the ire of the ogre as it reached up, trying to snatch him from atop the barrels. Quickly, Sir Strider leapt off, carving a long strip of flesh off a thick, meaty finger in the same motion before ducking behind the creature, slashing at its ankles. "Damn it all, it's just a wall of meat!"

John slunk along the side of the barrel, trying not to get sent flying a third time - yes, healing magic could restore wounds if they were to get injured again, but the more they used it rapidly, the more it hurt, and the more it took usable life off their hands. "The minimal amount of healing magic necessary is always the right amount", they remind themselves quietly, before charging at the ogre. A loud, exhaustive grunt, and a downward swing drove the pick end into the gouge on the ogre's shoulder, pierced through cleanly, punctured through the other side. A sharp tug tore flesh from body, managing to rip the gouge even further, until the only thing left carrying the ogre's arm on its body was a thin strip of flesh.

Quickly, gravity got to work, pulling the arm completely off the ogre's body, where it landed on the floor with a loud, wet thud. "'Atta boy!" Sir Strider cheered, twirling around horizontally before jamming his blade into the ogre's calf, taking a couple of steps back while it was preoccupied trying to thrash John with its now-missing arm, and then running and shoulder tackling the ogre's leg, driving his blade even further before grabbing hold on the way down and yanking it out. The ogre let loose a bellowing scream of rage, grabbing Sir Strider by the cape and flinging him into the nearest wall without a second thought, slowly spinning around on its injured leg to roar again at John.

"Ah, that'll bruise in the morning..." Sir Strider groaned almost drunkenly, listening in close as the ogre, despite its... complications, slowly backed John into a corner with its bulk, pinning him between two barrels of booze. John took a couple of quick skips back, grabbed the handle of their warpick, and began to loudly chant.

"Ancest'rs, descendants, twin moons above, i prayeth to thee f'r the pow'r, grace, and lighteth with which i may bringeth peace to mine own foes. Amen." They spat out, before the ogre had a chance to reach out and rip John's face off, and rather suddenly, their warpick shone with a bright, sun-like torchlight, making the ogre back away in fright. Suddenly, the entire cellar, caked in imp and ogre blood and with a single barrel steadily leaking alcohol onto the floor (which was, frankly, far less than Sir Strider had imagined would happen). It was so bright that it was difficult to even look at closely, like a burning flare of metal, and so Sir Strider covered his face with one hand and just listened.

What it _sounded_ like was a series of church choral bells ringing combined with the ever-meaty sound of a young knight's warpick being embedded into the thick, bulky torso of an ogre, and a loud, wailing yell of fury. Then, it sounded like wet parchment being ripped in half, and then, another series of bright, light-colored bells ringing while the light calmed itself down to a steady simmer, and then dropped off entirely. John looked absolutely knackered, swaying back and forth gently, blood leaking from their nose, but the ogre, by all accounts, looked even _worse_ , its top half _entirely_ separated from its lower half, with a larger hole blown in its direct center. It was like it got hit with a cannon, all the exposed bits gently smoking, with enough oily blood leaking free that it was barely able to move, no longer having enough fluid to direct its hydraulic muscles.

Sir Strider walked up to the ogre, now cut thoroughly down to size, and proceeded to plant his sword in its head. "Come on, squire, let's get you back on your feet..." He muttered, reaching out to hook an arm underneath John's, getting ready to make a ruckus so they would be noticed...

* * *

It didn't take _too_ long for help to come extricate them from the hole they had found themselves within, what with the happy little lady finding someone with a rope ladder and using that to help pull them up within, say, the hour - but by that point, John had since passed out, sleeping quietly along Sir Strider's shoulders, hands loosely wrapped around the knight's torso. Hauling another sentient being up a rope ladder is not very easy, but it was doable with the help of some neighbors to pass them along to, as well as some more neighbors to actually hold the ladder.

Sir Strider gently swatted John along the face, then, until they woke up, lying on the floor of the brewery. Already, the cellar beneath them had begun to slowly shrink down to its original size, a soft grinding sound echoing throughout the brewery while John slowly awoke. "Did we win?" They asked, blearily, staring upwards at the ceiling. It was a rare occasion, John thought quietly to themselves, how often one stared at the ceiling.

Sir Strider let out a little chuckle, face scrunched up. "You cut an ogre in half, Squire Egbert."

"An ogre!? There was an ogre in my cellar?" The astonished woman cried out, clasping her hands over her face in concern. "Oh my, I'm so, so, so sorry, you two! If I had known there was an ogre down there, I would've... I don't even know!" She shook her head slowly, trying not to consider the idea too hard, dropping a small bag of coins into Sir Strider's hand. He immediately tossed it to John.

"It's no concern, ma'am. We're just doing our job." John croaked, throwing her a grin and flashing a thumb up at her.

"What the hell was that down there? I've never seen anything like it - have you been holding out on me, squire?" Sir Strider demanded, gently rocking on his heels, ducked into a squat. It was more a curious sort of demanding than a frustrated one, to be clear.

John laughed a little bit, tying the bag of coinage to their belt while the brewer shuffled off to get the two of them a mug of stout each. "I told you, they tried to train me in holy magic."

"Yes, and you said you _failed_ at that. Failed to absorb, even. Key word: "tried". Clearly, someone along this line didn't fail." Sir Strider challenged, his brow furrowing behind his visor.

John shrugged nonchalantly in response. "I guess my muscles memorized it then, even if my brain did not."

"Memorized an entire spell of that magnitude? I find that hard to believe." Sir Strider replied, scratching his head in a slightly aggressive, almost frustrated manner. "Can you do it again?"

"Absolutely not. I can barely move, Sir Strider. You're going to have to feed me that stout by hand." John joked, letting out a light little chuckle. "Speaking of," They continued, gesturing a hand loosely towards the friendly brewer, approaching with a mug of stout each. Sir Strider took his with gusto, while John gently rocked their neck back and forth. "None for me, miss, I was joking."

"Are you certain? The two of you worked so hard..." She replied, sounding almost a little sad that John was declining. "And it's good stout, too!"

John waved them away politely with a swishy little wave, slowly rolling over onto their side. Then, with just as much effort, they managed to just barely pry themselves up into a sitting position, legs politely criss-crossed underneath them, one hand barely managing to support their weight. "No thank you, ma'am, I don't drink." They answered with a goofy, buck-toothed smile.


	6. Chapter 6

"So, what are you going to do with your newfound wealth?" Sir Strider asked, nudging John in the side, perhaps slightly drunkenly, the smell of alcohol lingering on his breath just a little bit. "Felt that pouch, that's nine coins. Little lady gave us an extra for our trouble, that's sweet of her."

John looked at the pouch dangling off their belt as the two of them lounged in the town square, leaning on the massive cannon centrepiecing the entire settlement together. Children still frolicked and played, but the sun was beginning to loom down below the horizon, which meant that all the day's activities were beginning to come to an end. If this was anything like John's upbringing, once evening fell, that would mean it was time for tutoring and training, then dinner, then bed. Nice and regimented, like a well-made platemail chest piece. "This isn't exactly what I'd call wealth." John joked, dropping their warpick onto the ground and scrambling onto the cannon so they could lie back against the firm, smooth metal.

"Oh yeah? What are you used to? Glittering towers of gold, banners of the finest silk?" Sir Strider challenged, immediately dropping his sword onto the ground with a loud clatter so he could follow John up there. John didn't turn to look - they just stared upwards at the moons, watching their intimate orbit like they were seeing something they shouldn't have. As the sky grew darker, the local aurorae began to emanate again, forming sheet-like ribbons of color that danced across the sky and horizon. "Sounds like nine coins isn't much but lunch money for you, Egbert, darling. Care to donate to a charity labeled "Sir Strider's Lunch Fund", then?"

John laughed quietly, pulling their legs up so they could unbuckle their greaves and let them slide down the side of the cannon, landing in a heap on the ground. They wiggled their toes a little bit, no longer constrained in that tight space, and kept staring at the sky. "Yeah, actually, that's about it. Here." John said, untying the bag of coinage from their belt and passing it to Sir Strider.

"W-what? No, Egbert, I was- I was joking. We both took down the ogre, we split the money. I will take the bigger half, though." Sir Strider said, audibly dropping a first heavy coin against the palm of their leather underclothes with a thump. Then, the other four, clink, clink, clink, clink, tucked away into a coin pouch of his own. Then, he pressed the bag back into John's hand, laughing. "You sure are an odd one, Egbert. Not in it for the money even though you come from wealth. You can smite an ogre in half but you can't read. You don't even drink!"

John laughs again, a little harder, their armor rattling against the cannon's surface. "My father was a paladin, Sir Strider. Why would you expect me to enjoy alcohol?"

"There are people who don't enjoy alcohol?" Sir Strider asked, sounding genuinely surprised, affect flat. He reached up, prying the visor up from his helmet so he could get a better glance at the sky, continuing her deepening of shade from light orange-pink to the flat, low, humming fuchsia that signified the arrival of nighttime, and with it, stars and constellations.

"I'm sure a great deal many!" John answered, lightly bumping Sir Strider on the side. "What, did _your_ father not imbue you with an antipathy for the substance?"

Sir Strider chuckled, a little hidden undercurrent of bitterness, like a smooth tea. "I never knew my father. I was raised by my Brother, an assassin for the Queen."

John gulped. "That's, uh. Grim."

Sir Strider laughed, much harder, much more sincerely this time. "Oh, you never fail to give me a good reaction, Knight Egbert."

"Wait, so are you joking about your brother being one of the Queen of Derse's red hands, or not?" John asked, turning their head to face Sir Strider. There was a clangor of metal against metal as Sir Strider turned back to face them, face completely neutral, a flat line on his mouth.

"Absolutely not, that's one hundred percent true." Sir Strider answered.

"I genuinely cannot tell whether or not you are pulling some kind of jape, so can I request you clarify your sincerity in this regard, Sir Strider?" John asked, crossing one leg over the other, adjusting a little bit in their armor.

"I am absolutely, one hundred percent sincere. My Brother was an assassin for the Queen and taught me the skills of murder and devilry as a child. Then he was tasked with killing the dark knight--" Sir Strider began, only to be interrupted by John cutting in.

"Becquerel Black." John finished for him. Sir Strider's face hardened, if only for a moment.

"Yeah. And then he disappeared. How'd you guess?" Sir Strider asked, turning over onto his side so he could face John more easily. His entire posture shifted in a moment - before, he was relaxed, lazy, even, but now it was like a lever had been thrown. His positioning, the way his arms were held in close, his body pulled inward, head leaning forward. He wanted to hear what John had to say.

"How much do you believe in the Gods and their machinations, Sir Strider?" John asked, not moving an inch, seemingly disconnected from the prior flow of the conversation.

Sir Strider scoffed lightly. "Did they exist at some point? Demonstrably so - we have the records to prove it. Do I believe in their "divinity"? Not even half as far as I can throw it."

"You can't throw divinity, it's intangible." John helpfully pointed out.

"Yes, thank you. Anyway, no. I don't believe in the Gods as entities that exist somewhere above us in the aether, watching us mortals. They were immensely powerful magi, wizards, and alchemists at the top of their fields, who dazzled early sentients with powerful displays of magic. Nothing more, nothing less." Sir Strider rattled off, making grandiose little gestures with his hands as he talked, almost angrily shaking his hand towards the sky. "I don't very much believe in prophecies, or demigods, or anything of the sort."

"But you believe in devilry as a skill that can be trained?" John asked, quirking an eyebrow. Sir Strider seemed confused.

"Of course I do. I can verify its existence - watch." He responded, snapping his fingers and summoning a small mote of sickly, yellowish flame that flickered for a moment above his index finger before snuffing itself out in the wind. "I have all the magical talent of a post-feast flatulence. But nauseating incendiaries such as these are easy when you have contracted your life out to a Devil."

"You _what_?" John half-asked, half-yelled, shooting up into a sitting position and scooting backwards, almost falling off the cannon. A couple seconds of stabilization and they managed to get themselves into a decent sitting position, albeit one now several inches further away from Sir Strider.

Sir Strider laughs. "Do you not know this, Knight Egbert? Every member of the court of Derse expected to deal with combat, or hunt monsters, is contracted with a devil of the Noble Circle. In exchange for a few droplets of blood and our last ten years of life, we are allowed to siphon off their reserves of magic like a leech." He explains, snapping his fingers again and drawing out a larger flame, one that he gently plays with between his fingers like a court jester playing with juggling balls. "There's a ceremony and everything -- is this really not common knowledge?"

John's face was puckered up into an uncomfortable expression of slight nausea. "No, I can't say I did, nor can I say I'm a fan of knowing now."

"Oh, shove off it, your lot worships a sun fairy. It's no different." Sir Strider shoots back, flicking his head backwards, almost like a horse snorting with derision. He let the ball of fire extinguish itself on his fingertips.

"I don't know how I can explain to you in plain Common the immense gulf of differences between Skaia and literal, actual devils." John returned fire, looking more than a bit cross having the religious quasi-figure they were raised worshiping compared to actual, honest to Gods devils. "And Skaia is not a "sun fairy", it's - it's a manifestation of energy that supposedly tells prophecies through dreams and provides a power source to our court magic. It is neutral, fair, and impartial. It is not a Devil, _literally made of evil_ , thank-you-very-much."

Sir Strider rolled his eyes. "Oh, simple Squire Egbert, thinking the world boils down so neatly into "good" and "evil" lines. I'll disabuse that notion quick, so listen closely - there is no "good" or "evil", there is simply action and outcome. Learn this now or die with some "hero's" blade in your gut twenty years from now, you suckling hoglet of a human."

John winced a bit, frowned, and then started scooting down the cannon, taking care not to land on their greaves, or weapon, or Sir Strider's sword. "That wasn't very nice." They said, strapping back into their leg armor. "I think I've had my fill of this conversation. I'm going to depart to my room now. Feel free to... do whatever it is you feel like, I suppose. Enjoy your coin, Sir."

"It wasn't, you're right. I'm sorry." Sir Strider said, quietly, but loud enough for John to hear. It was clear, to both of them, that he had taken a step too far. 

John didn't turn around or respond, trying not to stomp their way to the inn.

* * *

John lay quietly on their bed, finally out of their armor and into some normal linens for a change, staring upwards at the ceiling. On the nightstand, a small little lamp flickered back and forth with yellowish light, casting a slightly disorienting pallor over the entire room, making their shadow dance and twirl and waltz to some invisible, unpredictable beat. There was a gentle, soft knock at the door. "Do come in, unless you're of house Strider, in which case you must make your repentance in the morrow."

"Great, I'm not him, then." Roxy replies through a crack in the door, gently pushing it open. They carry with them a small candle, its bright orange-red flame mixing with the yellow in the room to make a color not entirely like a lovely sunset, albeit still one with a slight unearthly quality to it. Roxy shut the door behind them and gently walked in, shed of their innkeep equipment, now only in sleep clothes - a loose, slightly billowy shirt, trousers. They walked over to John, pulling up a chair, and setting the candle down on the nightstand. "Are you feeling alright? You were quite loud, your way up the stairs - did you and my cousin have some sort of lover's quarrel?"

John scowled at Roxy with a look of such intensity that they immediately began withering, raising both hands and waving them about slowly. "Right, right, sorry, not a time to joke. I imagine Sir Strider isn't quite your type anyway." Roxy said, their hands getting faster as the withering glare failed to diminish. "I'm just going to shut up and let you talk, then."

Roxy breathed a quiet sigh of relief when that seemed to work. "I'm not exactly comfortable in the knowledge that every member of the court of Derse is contracted out to a Devil. Do they not think the beasts will inevitably come for their end of the bargain? Are _you_ , Roxy? I will be blunt - I enjoy your company, but I may enjoy it far less if that is the case." John quietly spoke. It was clear that they were thinking about this for some time.

Roxy sighed. "How much do you know of Devils, John?"

"Enough to know that they are rancid creatures, materially composed of evil, negative energies, that exist to cause nothing but blight and malice upon this plane." John repeated, a lesson that had been drilled into their head since birth. Roxy reached up and pinched the bridge of their nose softly, and, for the moment, John was reminded enough of Sir Strider to be made intimately uncomfortable.

"I'm... Look, John. I'm not saying this as an agent of the court of Derse or anything like that. I've since abandoned that life. It's not for me, and it never was. I have no stake in petty court squabbles - I wish to live my life here, in this inn, a peaceful and kind existence. One day I will happen upon a lovely lady, or lovely lad, and we will fall in love here in the mountains, away from everything awful about castles and warfare." Roxy began, leaning into their palms, forward on the chair, its back legs tipping just slightly off the ground. "I want you to know that you are free to ignore me and everything I am saying right now. I have no vested interests in you as a person, or my cousin. What I am about to say - you are free to call it a bald-faced lie, cut ties with Sir Strider and I, and live your life without any Dersites. That's your prerogative."

"Go on." John said, after a moment of silence.

"It's really not so black and white. I'm not saying feel sympathy for the devils, but you've been fed... inaccurate information about the world." Roxy continued.

"Don't condescend to me, Innkeep." John nearly barked out, voice teetering on the edge. Roxy leaned backwards and waved their hands about, a bit frantically, trying to control the pace of the conversation.

"No, no, let me, please - they lied to us too. They speak of Prospitans as if they are irrational cultists indoctrinated into worship of celestial bodies, blithe idiots who stare into the sun and let it burn out their eyes rather than embracing rational, empiricist views of the world."

"And what if I am?" John interjected. Roxy almost reached up to pinch the bridge of their nose again, but then settled their gesticulating hands down into a slower pace instead.

"I don't think you are, John. I do think you are a bit sheltered, though. Devils aren't literally made of evil - they're Monsters, just ones that can talk. Little else. We keep them kept in cages beneath the dungeons, and they are satiated with the lifespans fed from the court. A devil can never take control of me, or force me to do anything I wouldn't want to do. And, likewise, I know that you're _not_ a crazy sun cultist willing to reject skepticism and empiricism out of hand the second it challenges your beliefs. Dave told me about what you did to that Ogre - I don't... I don't think there is a rational, skeptical explanation to that." Roxy continued. John's face softened, the anger and pain and frustration slowly wearing away, eyebrows still furrowed, but now in a more confused direction. "Sometimes your sun-god gives you a miracle when you need it. There's no explanation to it that works otherwise. You said yourself you barely know how to perform holy magic."

"You're right, I don't. I can't read, so anything but the most basic healing spells are barred from me. Incantations, muscle form, visualizations, all committed to page." John murmured, curling up into an uncomfortable little ball on the bed. "I just had to kill it. That's all. Must've been taught the spell by Father at some point."

"Right, that's- that's the other thing. I mean. Sorry, I'm like, woo! I'm talking in circles here like a drunkard." Roxy awkwardly rambled, waving one finger in the air in a quiet, circular motion. "Your Father was killed by Becquerel Black. I think there's not a single person in town who doesn't know that, even if they don't know you by face. David's caretaker, Brother Strider, he--"

"He disappeared trying to kill Black, I'm aware." John interrupted. Roxy gulped quietly and nodded.

"Right. Yeah. That. Call me a little Prospitan-cuckoo if you want, but I can't help but feel like there's a reason you two got shoved together. I don't know. Maybe I'm too optimistic, got fed too many bedtime stories." Roxy continued, steadily getting more uncomfortable with each moment, their face screaming for escape. They were flubbing this conversation. John was a stone wall of denial, it felt like - heavy and impenetrable. "I don't know, I'm sorry. I'll- I'll stop bothering you now, I've probably ruined your li- your night enough. Sorry. Sorry." They quietly spoke, getting up from the chair and grabbing their candle.

"We were shoved together because he sought me out and I followed, against his will, afterwards. That's "empirical", isn't it? That's the facts of what happened." John said to Roxy's back as they turned around.

"Yeah, sorry. That's the facts. My apologies. I'll just get out of your hair." Roxy mumbled uncomfortably, turning around at the tap of their shoulder. Almost immediately, their body tensed up in preparation for some kind of strike, and John's face melted into diffuse confusion. "Sorry."

"What are you apologizing so much for?" John asked.

"I mean, I just, I came in here to tell you that your beliefs are wrong so you can get along with my stupid good-for-nothing cousin so maybe you could help him get some Gods-damned closure and maybe the two of you could put down a dangerous lunatic what-the-hells-do-I-know-I'm-just-a-dumb-little-inn--" Roxy began to stammer out, taking fewer and fewer breaths between each word as they sucked in air through their teeth, visibly starting to sweat. "Why-wouldn't-I-apologize-I-just-came-in-here-to-insult-you-condescending-I-I-I--"

"Roxy." John cut in, putting both of their hands on Roxy's shoulders. They tensed up again, face closing off completely - eyes shut, lips pulled inward, arms reaching up to cover their head defensively. "Breathe. In and out."

Roxy breathed, body slowly uncoiling itself from necessary defensive posture. Their shoulders, high and tight on their body, began to lower, snail-lumbering downwards. "Sorry."

"Stop apologizing, you've done nothing wrong. I'm going to listen to you. And think about what you've said. I can't guarantee I'll abide by it, because you are effectively telling me everything I know is wrong, but I also left home for a reason. Please breathe and calm down." John said, quietly, gently shaking Roxy back and forth. Roxy took another couple of deep breaths, arms finally lowering back to their sides. Once they did, John let go of their shoulders. "Alright?"

"Yeah. Alright. Sorry. For the freaking out I mean. And the apologizing. Sorry about that." Roxy replied, meek, quiet, almost a complete 180 from the person John had met hours ago. John reached out and pulled them into a gentle, soothing sort of hug, which Roxy silently reciprocated, and then let go, before blowing their candle out, casting the room once again into just yellow. "Good night, John. Sleep well." They said, at the precipice of the door and the hallway, while John got back into bed, grabbing a little dial on the lamp and twisting it to cut off the flow of oil, drenching the room in darkness.

"Good night, Roxy. Sleep well." John said, watching as Roxy opened the door, stepped through the doorway, and softly shut it. Sighing with a mixture of exasperation and odd, wistful sadness, John worked their way under the blankets and prepared to pass out.


	7. Chapter 7

Throughout the night, while John slept, they were, well... "Tormented" wasn't quite the correct term, although it did feel, at times, like a kind of torment. John was not a person who believed in "Gods" and their visions of divinity. Even the Skaia they were raised to revere was merely a power source, a supernatural battery from which the court of Prospit derived its holy magicks, occasionally a source of wisdom through prayer but only incidental, not as the one delivering the truth. Even with that in mind, John could not stop the visions from flowing as they slept.

As usual, John dreamt of the ocean.

Ever-consuming, swirling glass-still gyre beneath them, from which all life sprang and all life would one day return. They saw themselves, staring back at them in the glass-blue abyss that it always was. And they wandered, as the rest of the world sprang up beneath them, empty, bereft of life. A quiet, desolate wasteland. John, in their dream, found the town of Alekhine, mashed along the rest of the towns and villages and castles and fortress, in this graveyard of empires from which no living being escaped.

The cannon was used, clearly, its barrels blown apart by the force of its own launching. The brewery they had saved yesterday had been burnt to the ground. There was not a single child or mother or brewer or innkeep in sight. Nothing but emptiness and void, as far as the eye could see, the mountains in the distance all collapsed into each other, forming an impenetrable barrier, spherically capturing this ruined world. An egg, from which a new world may or may not have spawned - in John's dreams, at least.

John wandered into the smoldering ruins of the inn. Up the stairs, tracing their hands along charred wood, peaking through cracks in the walls. Over to the room they were in, at the end of the hall, door solidly shut. John turned around, to look at the other doors, with only one of them shut just as firmly as John's. Reaching over to the handle, John gave it a little shove. Somehow, they weren't surprised that when the door came off its hinges, it revealed a sleeping Sir Strider, dressed in some sort of loose, billowy purple sleepwear.

No, look a little closer, John - there were _two_ Sir Striders, the one in purple overlapping the one you were more familiar with, an opaque phantom overshadowing its original, still in comparatively more drab sleepwear. For the first time, John looked at their own clothes, noticing a similar set of golden robes protecting them from the elements, the harsh chill and biting heat of the ruined dreamworld.

Something inside John told them it would be a bad idea to wake up Sir Strider. Instead, John gently padded their way back down the hallway, and into their own room, where they found themselves sleeping calmly, and a towering figure looming over their bed.

With a loud, metallic creak, the figure turned to John. A knight in tarnished, scorched armor, once silver, now marred tar black with char. Bright green eyes shimmered through the lupine helmet, metal elaborately shaped into the form of a wolf, a long black cloth scarf covering up the figure's neck and chest, drifting along their back. The ends of the scarf, lifting in the winds and the current of the flames, looked just like angel wings. A long, curved blade, foreign to any swordsmith John knew, baring only a single cutting edge, scraped along the ground, and claw-shaped greaves and gauntlets cut through the air as it approached.

John could feel their body rejecting their commands to move. In a dream, sometimes you could only move sluggishly, or not at all, and this was no exception. All John could do was watch as the figure ran John through with their blade, and they woke up with a bright, startled gasp, chest full of pained ache. John sat up from their pillow, clutching for their chest, making sure that there was no blood, only a phantom pain that slowly began to ebb. Grabbing the gas lantern, John flicked the dial and gave it a couple of thumps until it started up again, throwing its dead yellow flame across the room. Then, John grabbed the handle of the lantern, got out of bed, made sure their socks were fit on right, and got walking.

Couldn't sleep like this.

John wasn't stupid. They knew the reports, the sightings. They knew Becquerel Black when they saw them, even if they had never seen the lupine dark knight before in their life. Burnt, pitch black armor in the shape of a wolf. A blade from a foreign land. Piercing green eyes. John felt like they could see the phantom even now, watching them from some hidden space inside their head, like a farmer watching branded cows mill about in the field. They held the lantern close to their chest, trodding as quietly as possible through the inn, down the stairs, and out the front, where they were surprised to see Sir Strider and Roxy both awaiting them.

Well, maybe "awaiting" wasn't the right term, because they both seemed startled by someone else approaching. Roxy jumped a little bit, and Sir Strider's body visibly twitched in an almost defensive manner. "Oh, it's just you." Sir Strider said quietly, gesturing a fragrant pipe in John's direction. "Come out, shut the door, don't make too much noise. Don't want to wake anyone up."

"Aye." John replied, setting the lantern down on a nearby barrel, and then sitting on a second barrel placed next to the first, gently kicking their legs back and forth. "What brings you two out on such a dreary night?"

The night was indeed somewhat dreary - a light patter of rain had begun to batter at the rooftops, producing a gentle, soothing drumbeat, in large contrast to the burning ruins John had just escaped. "Bad dream." Sir Strider replied. John cocked an eyebrow.

"Just couldn't sleep, so, out here to relax a little bit." Roxy answered, taking a small puff from a pipe of their own, albeit one much longer and narrower than Sir Strider's. With a gentle cough, they blew thin wisps of white smoke out into the rainy air, away from John. "Care to partake?" Roxy asked, offering their pipe to John, who shook their head and raised a hand politely in response.

"No thank you, I prefer to keep my body clear of adulterants. Tobacco?" John asked.

Roxy shook their head softly, turning back around and facing outside, leaning on the wooden fencing separating the front porch from the outside world. "Cannabis." They answered. "I think Dave might have some tobacco, come to think of it, but that's not my herb of choice. I think it deadens the lungs."

"Maybe so." Sir Strider answered, gazing out into the distance blearily. After several days almost always watching him in armor, it felt slightly surreal to see him in just... normal sleepwear. Same as John. Same as how John saw in their dream. "I smoke what I have. Some days it's this. Some days it's that. Who's to say? Life's an adventure, I don't worry too much about my medicine."

Roxy giggled quietly. "In this case, I believe today we are both smoking cannabis."

Sir Strider shot a somewhat offended look at Roxy. "And what makes you so sure of that, dearest cousin?"

Roxy laughed harder now, only quieting themselves down to avoid waking anyone at such dark hours. "Because I saw you taking a bit from my personal cupboard under the bar before you went outside."

"Oh." Sir Strider quietly mumbled as both John and Roxy shared a good chuckle at his expense. Perking back up, he turned his back to both of them, taking another slow, thoughtful inhale of smoke. "Well, it's very quite good, I'll give you that much."

"What did you dream about?" John asked, apropos of nothing in particular. Sir Strider tilted their head towards John, if only for a moment, as if appraising their intentions.

"Why would you like to know? My dreams are a private place, Knight Egbert. You'll have to hire a mage to wrench them from my mind if you want access." Sir Strider rambled quietly. The rain began to harden, droplets becoming heavier, firmer, laying down a more precise, thudding rhythm against the roof of the inn.

John looked down at their feet. "Was it the ocean, or the ruins?"

"Come again?" Sir Strider responded, just a hair too fast to go unnoticed. Roxy turned around, leaning against a post with a little twinkle of... _something_ in her eye.

"When I dream, I dream of the ocean. Not any particular ocean in the world, but one that I know, in that way that you know things in your dreams, is singular. _The_ ocean. And from the ocean springs... the rest of the world. A jumbled assortment of memories and places I thought I've been to, but in disarray, and disrepair, and lacking the presence of a single human soul." John explained, looking down at their hands with an odd, happy-sad sort of expression on their face. If you had to put a name to it, you could possibly call it melancholy.

Sir Strider looked back at John with furrowed brows. "The ruins. I never wake up in time to see the ocean, but I trust you that it's there."

"And you're wearing purple in your dream, aren't you?" John asked, looking back up, meeting Sir Strider's gaze. Now, Sir Strider was more than just a furrowed brow - he looked a bit angry.

"Yeah. Purple robes." He answered.

"And today, you woke up because you saw him, didn't you?" John asked, not bothering to clarify who they were referring to. The anger on Sir Strider's face subsided into some sort of strange weariness, and he leaned back against the wooden railing, taking another long inhale of smoke. His chest rose with motion, lungs filling, swelling, and he blew the fine mist from his nostrils like a dragon preparing to breathe flame, watching it drift away, scattering into the air, spreading its herbaceous, earthy scent across the porch.

"Yeah." Sir Strider replied, startlingly taciturn. "Just a bad dream, Knight Egbert. Nothing more. Leave well enough alone."

Sir Strider turned back around, looking away from John while Roxy walked past them. "I think I'm settled for the night, knights. You two play nice." They said, drifting one hand lightly across the back of John's as they walked over to the edge of the porch, sticking their pipe out into the rain. When they were, apparently, satisfied at the end result of whatever it was they were doing (John was, personally, unsure), they turned the pipe upside down, dumping its contents onto the ground. "Or I'll sneak into your rooms and hide your weapons."

"You wouldn't dare." Sir Strider shot back, as Roxy walked back across, politely smiling at John, and towards the door.

"Oh, wouldn't I?" Roxy replied, and disappeared into the inn.

There were several minutes of somber silence, as Sir Strider finished off the rest of his pipe's contents. Like Roxy, he stuck his pipe out in the rain until it filled up with water, and then overturned the burnt plant matter inside over the wooden railing and onto the ground, where rain would continue to slowly pelt it apart into bits and pieces of char. Then, he turned to John.

"What do you want, Egbert?" He asked, very plainly. "I figured you'd want very little else to do with me after yesterday afternoon's debacle."

"You would be correct in that assumption. I do want very little to do with you at the moment." John answered, face grim but smiling with some amount of strange assuredness. "Unfortunately, I think fate, or Skaia, or the Gods, or the Devils, or whatever other nebulous force is in control of the current of our lives, has different plans in that regard."

Sir Strider couldn't help but roll his eyes. "There is nobody in control of my life besides me. I am responsible for every choice I make, for good or for ill. Nothing guides my hands besides my own intent, Egbert."

"And yet we dreamt of Becquerel Black together, and woke up at the same time." John replied. Seemingly in retaliation, Sir Strider snapped his fingers, summoning up a dull yellow flame, and gestured it towards John. "Surely, there's something to that--"

"Flee from my devilry once more, Knight Egbert, and bother my presence not again. I have done well enough handling myself and my issues by my lonesome, and I see not a reason to change that behavior today, nor will I tomorrow, or the next." Sir Strider answered, face and voice both full of bitter venom.

Reaching out, John clasped their hand over Sir Strider's finger, face twitching into an unconscious wince as the flame burnt at their skin before snuffing itself out. Pulling back, John started shaking their hand with a limp "Ow, ow.", reaching it out into the rain in order to get some cooling water on the minor burn. "Do you think your little flames will be enough to handle Becquerel Black, Sir Strider?"

Sir Strider scoffed, turning back around, away from John. He snapped his fingers again, drawing out a larger flame, feeding it with muttered words in an incantational tongue until it was nearly the size of his head, flickering and wobbling, threatening to twist out of control. "I will handle my problems the way I have handled every other problem in my life. If that's a problem for you, I'll handle you just the same." He said, clasping his hand shut, snuffing the fire out into trailing, burning wisps, hanging in the air for a moment before dispersing.

"No you won't." John replied. "You're going to teach me how to read and help me become a knight-errant, as per the terms of our original agreement - you wouldn't want to be known as an oath-breaker, I take it. And, along the way, if we happen to stumble into the lupine dark knight, well, I suppose you may be glad to do it with a partner at your side than by your lonesome!"

Sir Strider turned around to face John, quiet fury burned into his expression. "You're mad. You're insane."

John grinned wide. "That's not a "no"."

Sir Strider clenched their face up, gnawing at their bottom lip, trying hard to suppress a wail of frustration and anguish that would doubtlessly awaken several individuals and infuriate Roxy. Quickly, it passed, dissipating into a loud, angry sigh. "You are an intense nuisance. Do you typically get your way like this all the time - bludgeoning people into submission until they are forced by virtue of honor and promises to accept your terms?"

John's buck teeth stuck out wide as their grin intensified. "Maybe so. Who's to say?" They said, hopping up from the barrel and grabbing their lantern. "I'm headed back to bed. You sleep well, when you do."

Sir Strider sighed, pinching the bridge of their nose, turning around and going back to watching the rain. "You too, Egbert."


	8. Chapter 8

"Oi, Egbert!" Sir Strider yelled over the morning din, the boiling sunlight scorching away the shadows in the inn. Roxy, visibly tired but in good spirits, ferried meals back and forth from a small kitchen, refilled flagons of ale and stout, and generally performed all the functions expected of an innkeeper, occasionally getting a coin or two for their service. John, on the other hand, was much more visibly exhausted - after the discussion last night, sleep did not come as easily as expected, and when it did, only in fits and starts. To say John was exhausted would be a severe understatement.

At least John wasn't awake in the morning and also wearing armor, unlike Sir Strider. Did that man really not have a single scrap of casual clothes? Not that John could really complain since they were still in their sleepwear, blearily stumbling over to Sir Strider and taking a seat at a big, round table next to them. "Sleep well, Sir Strider?"

"Like a baby. Come, come." Sir Strider answered nonchalantly, gesturing over to a great, wide tome full of yellowed pages and absolute chicken scratch. Perhaps a better set of eyes could read the written word, but to John, it all blended together into a smear of ink. "We still have to teach you, do we not?"

John groaned quietly. "Do we really have to? I think I would prefer to avoid this nonsense right now." They said, laying their head down on the table with a loud sigh.

"Nonsense? Nonsense! You said you wish to be tutored in the academic arts? Well, here we are, Egbert, my good friend. It's not like we'll be using the morning hours to fill bounties, so we may as well put the time to productive use, aye?" Sir Strider replied, a painfully smug grin painted across his face. Shuffling the book upwards slightly, he revealed a piece of vellum and a small quill, gently pressing them against John's face.

"This is you retaliating for the ignominy I've laid at your feet last night, is it not?" John asked, straightforward as ever. Sir Strider's grin widened.

"Yes." Sir Strider replied.

"I do not have a choice in the matter, do I?" John asked.

"No." Came the inevitable response.

John heaved loose a large, dramatic sigh, slowly pulling their head up from the table. "I just don't understand how I am expected to read a text if the text is to keep _changing_ on me. Is there some sort of magic that can affix the ink in place on the page? Really, I do wish to--"

"Wait, hold on a second, before you continue your ramble." Sir Strider interjected. "Did you just say that the ink is _moving_?"

"Yes?" John asked, feeling that Sir Strider was a very foolish person for even asking.

Sir Strider looked away for a moment, making a face that John craned their neck to see and analyze. Unfortunately, though, it was outside of John's field of vision. When Sir Strider's face returned, it was full of some kind of slightly horrified concern, visor lifted completely enough, hands wrenching forward to grab at John's face. "Oh, okay." John squeaked, as Sir Strider's bright red eyes peered as deeply into John's as humanly possible. Sir Strider pulled one hand away, quietly snapping his fingers to summon his sickly yellow flame, bright enough to make John squint, only to have their right eye forced open by Sir Strider's other hand. "This is somewhat uncomfortable, please stop."

"Oh, alright." Sir Strider replied, pulling away, thumping his chest twice to release a small heh-hem that had built up, and snuffing out his flame so that he could pull his visor back down. "Knight Egbert, I do not wish to alarm you - I'm not a medical professional, a healer, or any sort of physician, but I do believe there may be something wrong with your eyes."

"Hmm." was John's response, chin rubbed thoughtfully and thoroughly.

"Hmm? Hmm what? I'd expect you to have a bit more of a response than that, surely." Sir Strider questioned, leaning an elbow on the table, looking at John expectantly. "Your eyes may be broken! Would that not beggar more of a response than a simple "Hmm"?"

"I'm thinking about it, you gnat!" John snapped back. Then, they simply shrugged their shoulders. "I just assumed all this time that everyone saw writing the same way."

"You never bothered to ask until now?" Sir Strider asked, incredulously. Thumping the table twice with his hand, he flipped his book around and tilted it up to an idle young halfling sitting at the other end of the table, writing on a parchment of his own. "You there, halfling child. This text--"

"I'm twenty." The halfling replied, unamused, going back to his work in short order. Sir Strider thumped the table thrice more.

"Please, my apologies, just - this text, it is as still as a dead snail, is it not?" Sir Strider asked, almost desperately so.

The halfling, black hair mussed into bedhead-rough spikes, with a supremely tired expression worn from years of poor sleep plainly showing how little he cared about the situation, stared back at Sir Strider. "Yes. It is completely still, as most non-magical text tends to be. Please leave me alone."

"Is this ruffian giving you any trouble?" Roxy asked, sidling behind the halfling and shooting Sir Strider a strange sort of conspiratorial sneer. John giggled under their breath, biting the back of one knuckle to avoid it turning into some sort of guffaw.

"No, Madam Innkeep. So long as he lets me get back to my work, at least." The halfling replied. Roxy's face twitched slightly at the term "Madam", but they made no comment on it, letting it by. Presumably they'd correct the halfling at a later occasion, when they weren't busy taking the opportunity to get one up on Dave.

"Right, well, you heard the man, Dave. Let him get back to his work." Roxy concluded, tilting their nose up with mock condescension towards Sir Strider, who immediately deflated.

"Well, you heard him. Text definitely does not normally move for other people. I do believe you have broken your eyes somehow, Knight Egbert - either that, or you've been cursed by a witch in your childhood and seem to have forgotten." Sir Strider said, turning his book back around and letting it thump down loudly onto the table, before shutting it entirely.

"Who knows? I think both are pretty equally probable." John replied, to which Sir Strider gave a particularly mighty shrug.

"I think it is fair to say that if you _literally are incapable of reading_ , then perhaps attempting to teach you to read may be a bit of a wash, at least until we could get some kind of trained healer to examine you and your strange eyes." Sir Strider responded, drumming his fingers along the cover of his mighty book gently. "I'm sure I could force you to make sense of the moving images in front of your eyes, but that seems counterproductive."

"I thought the intent was to torture me? Counterproductive is what I'd term this entire affair." John drolly whined.

"Yes, but torture you productively. I'm not interested in unproductive torture, Knight Egbert, only the kind that produces actionable results, such as a traveling companion more capable of assisting me in a timely fashion. If we are to work all this time for very little improvement, well, that is not a good use of anyone's time, mine or yours alike. I'm not a sadist, Knight Egbert." Sir Strider carried on, John doing little more but watching and blinking. "Oh, I know - how goes your skills in mathematics, Egbert?"

John shrugged, exhausted already from ten minutes or so of dealing with Sir Strider immediately after waking up. Blessedly, the two of them were interrupted by Roxy arriving with a plate of fried hen's eggs, still crackling slightly, and two thick pieces of toast. "You two seemed like you could use a small diversion. On the house."

"Perks of being related to the innkeep, eh?" Sir Strider joked, only to be immediately responded to by Roxy thumping the top of his helmet with a fork before pushing it into his hand.

"No, it's because I think John is disastrously cute, and could probably use a small break from dealing with you." Roxy said, giggling.

"Huh?" John mumbled, shooting up from a half-asleep state into immediate wakefulness. "What was that?"

"Oh, nothing!" Roxy teased, bopping John on the nose with a fork before putting it down on the table in front of them. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, they disappeared back into the morning crowd, further still, into the kitchen, vanishing from sight.

"...Hmm!" John mused, immediately scraping precisely half of the eggs (six, total) and one of the bread slices onto the far end of the warm plate, scooting their chair closer to make it easier to eat. While Sir Strider pried off the crusts of his toast, ripped them into small strips, and used them to dip into oozing yolk, John simply placed both eggs onto their slice of bread and folded it in half for easier consumption. For the first time in the morning, there was relative silence, at least, outside of the background noise that was "everyone else talking". Good food had a sort of quieting effect on the world around John, letting them just focus on nothing more than flavor and texture. Sure, people were discussing matters of their life, but there were eggs and toast - no need to pay attention to anything more than that. "Delightful." John mumbled, mouth full of food.

"Don't talk with your mouth full." Sir Strider said through a mouth full of food. John stared at Sir Strider, blinking a couple of times. Then, as obviously and loudly as they could, they _swallowed_ , making a show of gulping, and then bapped Sir Strider on the head with their fork. "Ow! What is it with people and hitting me with forks today?"

"Oh, come off it now, there's no way that hurt. You're wearing armor! In the morning, no less!" John half-yelled.

"It hurt my pride! I am wounded, Knight Egbert! Gravely wounded!" Sir Strider yelled back, grabbing his chest dramatically. Then, immediately, he settled back into a neutral pose. "Do you want the rest of my white?"

"Oh, sure." John answered, pulling the plate over and, seemingly for the first time this morning, using the fork for its intended purpose to scoop lacy, crispy curtains of egg white into their mouth, albeit not before cutting it into smaller, bite-sizeder chunks. They reached up to dab at their mouth with an invisible, mock napkin, before proceeding to do so for real with Sir Strider's remaining inner piece of bread. "You're not much of an eater, are you?"

"No, I can't say I am." Sir Strider replied brusquely. "I can go quite some time without requiring food."

"Ah, a skill I wish I possessed. My compliments to the chef! Would that be Roxy?" John asked.

"Last I checked, it was a mountainous fellow by the name of "Mr. Boxcarts". As skilled as Roxy is at a great many thing, I'm doubtful of her ability to both prepare and deliver this quantity of food on their lonesome." Sir Strider answered, flicking his head backwards, towards the kitchen (from which Roxy was busily emerging). "But it's been a good year or so since I've been in Alekhine, so it's entirely possible that it's changed in recent years. Oi, Roxy!"

"Yeah?" Roxy yelled across two tables.

"Does Mr. Boxcarts still work the kitchen?" Sir Strider yelled back.

"Aye!" Roxy answered, and then continued their bustle.

"Well, that answers that. I'll give him your compliments later." Sir Strider said, with a conclusive nod. "Mathematics - what's your view on the matter, Knight Egbert?"

John shrugged. "It's a thing some people do. I can cut things in half. I can double them. I can add and subtract. Is more needed than that?"

Sir Strider rubbed their chin. "I suppose not for any practical, common uses, no. It's not like you're planning on becoming a scholar of econimity or one of the natural sciences, I presume?"

"No, I think I am fine without that. I much prefer to hit things with my pick and do most of the thinking later." John joked, giving off a good, hearty chuckle in response.

Sir Strider immediately perked up. "Oh, right! That reminded me of a question I was planning on asking, but was then distracted by the lovely cooking of Mr. Boxcarts and the food-delivering countenance of a single Roxy Strider. If you cannot read text, how in the hells are you capable of aiming a warpick?"

John looked at Sir Strider like he had two hands. "With my eyes, Sir Strider. Are the enemies made of text?"

"...I mean, they haven't been so far." Sir Strider replied, laughing.

John seemed shocked, and was personally unsure if their own expression was true surprise or a mockery. "Wait, are there monsters made of text? Because if so, we may have an actual issue on our hands."

"Not that I'm aware of, but I'm sure some exist. Monsters are a strange and varied group, as unique as a snowflake fluttering from the skies." Sir Strider opined, dramatically raising one hand into the air and then letting it slowly drift down, fluttering his fingers.

"What exactly does that mean? Snowflakes are all very... very similar, are they not? All uniformly white and fluffy and cold... Surely, this is a jape?" John asked, leaning forward a bit with genuine curiosity. As much as the two got on each other's nerves (and they did, frequently), John couldn't help but admit that they found Sir Strider's rumblings of academia to be intriguing, even if he rarely understood much of what was being discussed.

"Oh, not so!" Sir Strider shot back, leaning forward to match, always excited to share knowledge. "You see, there are some philosophers of the natural sciences that have managed to utilize magic and very small pieces of glass - "lenses", they call them - that allow one to magnify their vision beyond the realm of normal sight. Using this, they allowed snowflakes to fall upon the lenses and examined them, coming to find that every snowflake, on a very small scale, possesses a unique hexagonal face to it! The current thought among them is that the elemental spirits express their own unique growth through the frigid waters, much the same way that no two sentients look quite alike, with even twins bearing some divergences." Sir Strider rambled on, beginning to quickly and passionately gesticulate as he talked.

"Hexagonal?" John asked. Immediately, Sir Strider snatched the piece of vellum from John, along with the quill, stopping only to bite the tip of it, drawing forth an anomalous droplet of blackish-purple ink. He proceeded to draw, albeit sloppily and quickly, a six-sided figure for John.

"Hexagonal - a shape consisting of six sides of equal length, connected at equal one-hundred and twenty degree angles to each other." Sir Strider demonstrated. "All snowflakes grow in this pattern, without found exception thus far."

"That doesn't look very equal to me." John joked, immediately receiving several droplets of ink flicked at their face for their insolence, which they blocked with a deftly raised hand. "Oh, to be a monster made of text, unable to be struck by a fledgling squire." John sighed wistfully.

"Right! Speaking of monsters. Has your food digested yet, Knight Egbert?" Sir Strider asked, getting up and out of his seat, tapping the tip of his quill twice, and shoving it into his coif.

"Enough, why?" John asked, not getting up.

"I figure now is as good a time as any to pick something up from the bounty board, eh?" Sir Strider asked, albeit mostly rhetorically, it seemed, since he immediately started walking over to it. John, for what it was worth, took their sweet time, another ten minutes or so, letting the food digest appropriately in their stomach.

"What a lout." The halfling across the table noted, at about minute six, once he noticed that Sir Strider was gone.

"Quite." John replied.

Eventually, once John's stomach felt prime to move about without disturbing its contents too much, they too removed themselves from the table, wandering idly through the morning crowd over to the bounty board. Sir Strider, however, already seemed to be finished looking, pulling a small parchment from it and gesturing it in John's face, before silently remembering that John could not read it, and pulling it back. "Right. Sorry."

"It's fine. What's the assignment today, Sir Strider?" John asked.

"Well, as you may be aware, this town is indeed surrounded on most sides by a particularly dense forest, one that continues quite a way up into the mountains. The town smith has received an order for several strange metal parts and pieces of import'd glassware, and requests an escort, less he fall prey to the creatures in the mountain. Thirteen coins. Seems simple enough."

"Ah, well. If you two insist." Came a small voice from behind, and below, them. John and Sir Strider both turned around to face the halfling, who was too busy scowling at them to make any other expression. "Try not to run your mouth too much, Knight, or I'll have to detract your pay."


	9. Chapter 9

"So why would you even bother with this job?" John asked, about as impolitely as one could, while they sat in the back of a very small wagon, three wheels gently pulling it along the ground with the single small horse at the front. There was not quite enough room for all three individuals to sit comfortably with all the luggage involved, so John allowed themselves the dangly back end, feet occasionally bouncing against the dirt path they followed out the village. Alekhine slowly started to drop away from them - the horse wasn't really in any position to go fast, nor were they pressed for time. The blacksmith sat on the box of parts, and Sir Strider gently watched the glass pieces, all already forged and sitting in their own crate, to make sure none of them bumped out of the cart.

"Money, Knight." The blacksmith said, pinching two fingers and rubbing them together. "The commissioner - Mr. Harley, or some shite like that, was willing to pay double my typical fee for the metal parts and quintuple on the glass. No idea who has that kind of money to throw around in this day and age, but, I thinks to myself, hey, I've got a couple of months for this job, I can teach myself glasswork."

"Halley? Like the lord?" John asked quietly, turning their head just enough so that the blacksmith could hear them more easily.

"No, _Harley_. Aitch-Ay--" They began, starting to spell it out, but Sir Strider cut them off with a wave of the hand. "Oh, couple with a donkey, Knight."

Sir Strider bounced his knuckles off the halfling's nose, watching them recoil in anger. "Squire Egbert here can't spell."

"Is that so?" The halfling blacksmith asked, cocking an eyebrow. "Shameful."

"Hey! A witch cursed my eyes as a child, can you blame me?" John barked back, half-jokingly.

"Yes. Witch probably cursed you for a bloody good reason if you ask me." The halfling replied, although their tone was so thick and heavy with a sort of biting, kicking timbre that it was impossible to tell if they were being serious or not. "Anyway, not the same as Lord Halley. I asked around, nobody knows of a "Mr. Harley" anywhere nearby, but they were going to pay me an absurd amount of money, so I requested the down payment and used it to buy the equipment to smelt glass." He explained, his expression changing to a pleased, almost smug sort of grin, arms folded over his chest.

"And then taught yourself over a couple of months? I find that spurious." Sir Strider challenged, tapping his sword's flat gently against the crate of lenses.

"Hey! Watch the merchandise!" The smith shouted, immediately whacking Sir Strider on the knee with a small but exceptionally firm looking hammer, leaving a nicely shaped dent in his already dent-covered armor. Sir Strider let out a lightly pained little yelp and kicked his leg out, almost tripping and falling out the cart, until John reached out and stuck the long end of their warpick behind him to stabilize him.

"Rude little gnome." Sir Strider spat, literally hawking a loogie out of the cart and onto the dirt path to express his displeasure.

"I'm a _halfling_ , not a _gnome_ , you spiteful little shit. I'll gnaw your ankles off and feed you to my horse if you even put a scratch on a single one of those gods-damned lenses if it's the last thing I do." The smith growled, baring a surprisingly sharp set of teeth at Sir Strider. John wasn't intimidated in the least, but he also knew very little about halflings, so presumably there was something there that was slightly cowing Sir Strider that John was missing.

"Hey, smithy, we never actually caught your name?" John asked, attempting to defuse the situation. "Would love to not have to refer to you constantly as "Smithy" or "Sir Halfling" or something of the sort."

"Sir? He hasn't been knighted!" Sir Strider protested, almost receiving another hammer for his troubles.

"It's polite, hush!" John responded.

"Your squire is right, you should very much shut up. My name is Karkat Vantas. I'm a smith. That's all." Karkat introduced himself, immediately turning away to look anywhere but at the two people sharing his cart.

Sir Strider remained silent, but John immediately recognized something. The creaking of the wooden wheels of the cart matched the churning gears in their brain, locking into place. With a sudden jerk, they whipped their upper body around, cracking their lower vertebrae at the same time (resulting in a satisfied little grunt). "Wait, Vantas? Like the preacher?"

"No, absolutely not like the preacher, and if you mention him again I'll rip your tendons out with my fingernails." Karkat growled, baring his teeth again. John, stupid as they were, was not able to be quieted by such a display, continuing on nonetheless.

"I don't think Squire Egbert mentioned a gender." Sir Strider muttered, quietly grinning.

"Quiet, you." Karkat hissed, pulling a sickle out of _nowhere_ , pointing the blade right to Sir Strider's inner leg, tip snugly fit between the loosest bits of armor. John reached out and hooked their warpick's pointy end on the tip of the sickle, lightly pulling it away.

"No, no, Kankri Vantas! My father knew him! They were good friends, I think!" John excitedly chittered away.

Karkat was not amused, flashing a _second_ sickle, his hammer having been strapped back into his toolbelt. "You better have a good reason for putting his name on your tongue, squire, or it's coming right out."

"Father Egbert? Does that ring any bells?-- I'd very much like to keep my tongue, thank you!" John replied, finishing their thought and then immediately, defensively covering their face up with both hands.

Karkat's face melted down into one of confusion, and mild pain. "You're... John Egbert? Father Egbert's..."

John waved Karkat away so he didn't have to finish the sentence. "Yeah, yeah. Me. Yep! Father Egbert's _child_. Sole one! Before he died. Yeah! That's me. Mmhmm. You're lookin' right at 'em. The kid of Father Egbert. That's--"

"Shut _up_. Gods almighty, are they always like this?" Karkat asked Sir Strider, gesturing a sickle in John's general direction.

"Yeah." Sir Strider answered, laughing almost silently, body heaving with the motion without creating the sound.

Slowly, Karkat put his sickles back behind his back, apparently onto some kind of strap or clip or somesuch - John certainly couldn't see from this angle. "Your father was a good man, Egbert! My dad left a lot of notes about him in his journals. He did good work. Shame to hear about what happened to him."

John awkwardly brushed the topic away with a gesture of the hand. "Oh, it's no problem at all, these... these things happen all the time!"

Karkat laughed bitterly. "Yeah, they sure do. What do you know of my father, Egbert? Anything I don't already?"

John racked their memory for information, trying to bring up any single scraps that might satisfy the ornery halfling. "I know that he apparently taught my father everything he knew about holy magic. And that your father was one of the best orators that Prospit had ever seen."

Karkat rolled his eyes and turned further around, staring at the horses. "Yeah, nothing I didn't know. Let's jabber less and rest more, we're gonna need our strength up if we need to bat off some wolves or somesuch." He said. John wasn't stupid, they could hear and feel the pain in Karkat's voice, but they also felt like prying it out at this point was impossible. They stared at the strange assemblage on Karkat's back, with some sort of metal... clasp? That the sickles seemed just stuck to, as if adhered, handles parallel, blades pointed outwards. Then, they turned around, facing the road dipping away from them.

"I'm sorry about what happened to your dad." John said, almost whisper-quiet after a good five minutes of silence, voice almost drowned out by the clopping of horse hooves and the grinding of wooden wheels.

"Don't be. What kid these days doesn't have an assassinated father figure somewhere in their life? That's just how it is." Karkat cracked, laughing. There was the same bitter taste as before, but John let it drop.

* * *

By the time anything of note happened, John had since fallen into a peaceful nap, lured into slumber by the rhythmic motion of the cart. When they woke up, they found themselves folded up into a gentle square and crammed into the corner of the cart, with Sir Strider having taken their place on the back of the cart - that was polite of them! Slowly, they began to rub sleep out of their eyes, flicking out little pieces of crusted up eye gunk out of the cart, metal occasionally clacking against metal. "Are we there yet, Mr. Vantas?"

"Karkat. And no, we're not there yet." Karkat grumbled, staring down at his hands. Every so often, he'd reach out with some sort of long, collapsing metal-wood doohickey and give the horse a little poke on the shoulders, making it start changing directions, slowly and cautiously.

"Are we... lost?" John asked, staring out at the seemingly endless ocean of trees. No sunlight reached particularly far down here, consumed by the yawning canopy opened up above them, leaves absorbing every fleck of light barring the occasional bounce or two. A stray sunbeam helped the forest from getting too dark, but if not for that, John would have no way of knowing whether or not it was night or day.

"No. Mr. Harley gave me this with his down payment." Karkat answered, showing a small little trinket in a little glass container to John. Some sort of needle on a wheel, constantly pointing away from John, although shifting slightly depending on how Karkat moved his hand about. "It's called a "compass". It uses magnetic material to orient itself towards local leylines, and apparently Mr. Harley has built his workshop directly on top of one, if his letter to me is accurate. Either that, or he's led us all into some kind of trap where we're going to die and then he'll just steal all the materials he paid me for, but, I like to have a little more faith in my fellow sentient than that." Karkat explained.

"Do you really?" Sir Strider challenged. "That seems uncharacteristic of you."

"No, of course I don't, why do you think I brought weapons, smart-aleck?" Karkat groaned, reaching back to pat the handles of his sickles.

"What's a magnet?" John asked, innocently enough.

"It's--" Sir Strider began, clearly winding up to deliver a long, technical explanation, judging by the way his entire body immediately shifted towards John in one almost violent motion, face alight with the desire to drop a fresh load of information on his squire's head like a hammer.

"It's metal that makes some other metal pull itself to it." Karkat interrupted, brandishing his little hammer towards Sir Strider, who immediately sunk down slightly, dejected. "If you have a big enough magnet, like a leyline, it'll make little magnets, like the metal in this compass, change direction to face towards it. Got it?"

John nodded, eyes sparkling with the delight of fresh knowledge. "Oh! Is that how your sickles are stuck to your back? With magnets?"

Karkat nodded, grimly staring outwards at the expansive forest. As the group passed by a tree, he effortlessly pried one of the sickles free, slicing off a branch to examine with a practiced stroke. "Yeah. With magnets, Egbert. Keep guard."

"Oh? Are we in danger?" John asked, sounding strangely excited by the prospect. They grabbed their warpick tightly, staring outward at the trees. They were incredibly large, some of them thicker than John's entire body, all of them easily stretching over top of them all and into the sky. The forest was silent, outside the gentle rustling of wind through the leaves, and... Wait.

"Yeah. I can't hear it either." Sir Strider said, making eye contact with John just at about the moment where they had the same revelation. "Forest's completely quiet. Never a good sign."

Karkat's teeth almost audibly ground together as he chucked the branch aside, letting it get crushed underneath the cart's wheel with a loud, noticeable _snap_ , disturbing several small birds from their branches. For once, noise, wings fluttering and panicked chirps as they vanish into the sky, clearly wanting out of the situation. "You're telling me. We're losing daylight."

"On it." John said, grabbing their pick and holding it gingerly in both hands while they slowly unfurled from the ball they had been sleeping in. "Ancest'rs, descendants, twin moons above, blesseth me with lighteth and grace so yond i am not high-lone in the dead of night. Amen." They murmured, just loud enough to be heard, before gesturing their pick aloft. It crackled with light, first as tiny, flickering sparks, and then into bright, yellow-white torchlight, the metal glowing but without hearth-like heat to match.

"Show-off." Sir Strider muttered, snapping his fingers to summon a sphere of yellowish flame about the size of a small ball, like the kind tossed around by children for their amusement. With both sources of light combined, the descending sun, casting orange light horizontally into the forest, was no longer necessary to see by - although, frankly, that made the situation feel worse. John's heart was pounding in their chest, with an odd mixture of excitement and anxiety.

"Hey, no need to measure manhoods, children, you _both_ can do magic." Karkat cracked, whipping out both sickles as the horse slowly trotted to a stop. "Alright, looks like the decision's getting made for us. Time to make camp."

"What a reliable mode of transportation. Let's just leave it and go finish the job ourselves." Sir Strider groaned, hopping off the cart. Karkat gently kicked one of the non-part-filled crates off the cart, the lid gently popping off in the process to reveal three bedrolls and a bunch of very tightly packed food, mostly hard breads and jerky.

"If you leave my horse to die I am killing you." Karkat said, matter-of-factly, adjusting the fallen crate so that it was sitting on its bottom and not dumping any of its food into the grass and dirt. "It's that simple."

"Fine, jeez, whatever. Killjoy." Sir Strider replied, brandishing his sword with exaggerated, exasperated gestures. "What's the plan?"

There was a loud growl in the distance, hidden somewhere behind the trees. John's hands squeezed around the handle of their warpick, as an _immense_ wolf, easily the size of Karkat's horse plus a little extra, began padding out from the dark. Long shadows stretched across its grey-brown fur, scraping it with stripes, like some sort of exotic beasts John had seen pictures of in the books they were taught from.

"Obviously, the plan is to kill it, genius." Karkat growled.

The wolf's nostrils flared, little streaks of greenish-white flame curling off its fur, teeth bared.


	10. Chapter 10

The wolf crashed forward like a cannonball through the forest, not even bothering to gnash teeth or lash out with its claws, only seeking to use brunt force and immense size to send one of its adversaries sailing into the nearest tree. Karkat dove out of the way, between the wolf's legs, immediately whipping both sickles into the creature's underbelly to rake down two parallel gashes while he exited out the side, carving bloody swathes into its body. John, meanwhile, stood there like an idiot, getting easily flicked into the nearest tree for their trouble, metal clanging against thick bark, only the grace of Skaia preventing an immediate concussion. "Get out of the damned way!" Karkat yelled, hopping several feet backwards as the wolf's two new wounds leaked thin, oily tar onto the ground, immediately alighting with flickering green flame.

Sir Strider flicked his wrist forward, channeling the floating yellow will-o-wisp he had summoned for light into a narrow bolt of flame, striking the wolf's pelt from the side, sending it rocking in the other direction before it dug its front paws into the ground, whirling to face him. The creature, more easily sighted in the clearing, towered over them, easily a good seven feet tall from paw to shoulder, with the rest of its body appropriately scaled up, like someone had took a normal wolf and made it larger, and angrier. Its teeth were sharp, pointed, serrated, slightly jutting into its lips, only the first of many details separating it from its brethren at a deeper glance.

Its fur bristled, each strand ending in sharpened points of keratin, more like spines than anything else. Its ears, a particular length and narrowness to them unbecoming of a much smaller lupine, twitched idly, triangulating points of sound, and its eyes lacked any pigmentation whatsoever, completely white in their sockets, skin pulled upwards into a vicious snarl. Shimmering, rainbow hues of saliva dripped from its maw, each one bursting into small peals of green fire whenever they stuck the ground, and its tail, more like a flail than anything else, angrily thumped against the ground, kicking up dirt and leaves and detritus from the forest floor.

"What _is_ that thing?" John shouted, dizzily stumbling to and fro while they recovered from their smack into a titanic tree trunk, grabbing their warpick tightly with both hands until it squeaked under the leather of John's gauntlets. Then, they charged.

"What, you've never heard of a dire wolf in your stories, Squire Egbert?" Sir Strider taunted, elegantly bouncing backwards on his heels like his armor was feather light and he was swimming in a lake, moving almost floatily away from each gnashing swipe and crushing bite from the wolf, a gentle, shimmering heat emerging from his greaves as he did so. "I thought someone as well traveled as you would surely recognize--" was all Sir Strider managed to continue before a cheap shot from the wolf's other paw sent Sir Strider into a tree. Unlike John, he managed to land on a smaller, narrower tree, resulting in it immediately snapping in half and whipping several branches into Sir Strider's eagerly awaiting face. "Balls, gods, Devil's blood, that smarts!"

"Can you two stop flirting for five god damn seconds and focus on the very large angry magic wolf trying to kill us?" Karkat shout-asked, flicking a small needle towards the dire wolf, embedding it squarely in the creature's eye to get its attention. "And keep it away from the gods-damned merchandise! That's worth more than the two of you put together!"

"Oh, I've heard of them plenty, just never seen one in the flesh! What a big fella!" John amazed, unable to help stopping to admire the monster for a moment before remembering that they were supposed to be killing it, and not admiring it. John leaned down, taking a moment to stretch both sore legs, and began charging forward again, breaking out into a sprint, the pointy end of their pick bared. With a loud warcry and a skip into the air, John sunk their warpick into the dire wolf's flank with a satisfying, meaty _thwack_ , before it whirled around, force of its rotation more than strong enough to loose John from their pick and send them flying again. Thankfully, without any aim involved, John merely rolled backwards a dozen times or so before skidding to a halt next to Karkat's frightened horse. Astonishingly, the horse had not bolted, but it did look absolutely prepared to kick the shit out of anything that got remotely close to it, so John wisely rolled over to the side.

"Kill it, you dunce!" Karkat shouted over the din as the wolf picked him for its next target, crouching low to the ground, teeth bared. Karkat, overconfident and full of braggadocio, pointed one sickle at the beast. "Oh, are _you_ calling me short now, too, tough guy?" He yelled, scraping both sickle blades against each other loudly. "Come at me, then, foul beast!"

"Very knightlike of you." Sir Strider idly quipped, slowly picking himself off the ground. There was a sudden, armor-rattling rush of wind as the wolf bolted forward, almost moving imperceptibly fast, interrupted only by two sickles being rammed into its flared nostrils from beneath. It let out an agonized howl, ripping Karkat from their handles and tossing him several feet in the air, before batting at its face, ripping both pick-like implements out of its nose and flicking them in separate directions. "Watch and learn, smithy!"

In an instant, Sir Strider was there, scooping Karkat up in one arm, and then he was gone, disappearing out of the way of a downward paw-swat to deposit Karkat safely near the first of his sickles. Then, gone again, ripping John's warpick out of the beast's side, tossing it underhand in John's general direction to collect, before getting thumped into the ground by a person-sized paw. The dust cleared slowly, revealing Sir Strider lodged a good half a foot into the dry dirt, cracking into a deep crater around him, his half-blade raised just enough to form a barrier between him and straining death. Oily, blood-like fluid spurted out onto Sir Strider's armor, coating him in shimmering liquid before a stray green spark set him up in flames.

"DAVE!" John screamed, running forward headfirst with boiling fire in their eyes. "Ancest'rs, descendants, twin moons above I prayeth to thee f'r the pow'r grace and lighteth with which i may bringeth peace to mine own foes!" They roared, a bright white light drawing the eye of every bird, every deer, every small worm and fluttering butterfly and lonesome hunter in the forest for miles. John's warpick began to crack, warp, and strain, held off to the side, gathering momentum, while the dire wolf's lips curled up into a vicious grin of malice, exposing every sharp, hungry tooth. It pressed down, smashing the burning Sir Strider into the ground, lifting up, and smashing down again, and again, burying Sir Strider deeper and deeper beneath the dust, a furnace of blood and oil.

John charged in close, a streak of light burning out of a fresh cut spraying free on their face, across their cheek. Another formed, as if from the aether, across the bridge of John's nose. Dismissively, the dire wolf drew its wrist back, preparing to flick John into the nearest tree once more.

"AMEN!"

There is no way that a human eye - or the eye of any sentient, really - could visualize the impact. For a moment, that exact meeting, where the first molecule of burning, boiling steel met magic-infused skin, was burnt into the retinas of everything that could see it. John, Sir Strider, Karkat, the wolf, and yes, even the horse, stuck on that freeze-frame moment, while the action continued, unseen, white consuming everything nearby. When the ashen dust settled, the dire wolf stood, lording over a now incapacitated John, their warpick warped and burning. Yes, it was now missing an entire forelimb and paw, but it bent down and snapped John's warpick in half with its teeth before using its bloodied nose to deliver a single routing hammer blow to the back of John's head, sending them dizzily down into the ground.

At the bare minimum, the fire consuming Sir Strider had been extinguished by the rustling-winds generated from the force of the impact, a wave of motion that could be felt, even if barely, from the town of Alekhine. Roxy, in the middle of cleaning a flagon with a wet cloth, felt it - felt the hem of their dress and apron gently push outwards, before pulling back inwards. Worriedly, they looked outwards, towards a wall, and then went back to their tasks.

Karkat panted heavily, only in possession of a single sickle, the other one lodged about nine feet up in a nearby tree after getting tossed around by John's smite. Gripping the handle with both hands, he spat blood into the ground and rolled both shoulders back, cracking his neck. "Right. You want some, you overgrown mutt? Come at me! I'll pry your slobbering maw apart tooth by tooth!"

Missing almost an entire limb, the dire wolf was indeed loosing blood onto the soil at a rather extreme rate, but the worst part about creatures fueled by magic was that blood loss was no longer much of an issue for them. Padding slowly through its trail of fire, the dire wolf loomed over Karkat, wretched, imperious, engulfed in an emerald inferno of its own making. What idle trick would this diminutive beast pull in a last-ditch effort for its life? One little morsel could move faster than they could be tracked. The other, well, it would be quite some time before the dire wolf had usage of that leg again. But this one? So small, so inelegant, it would barely be worth the energy spent chewing. So many little bones to pick out of teeth.

Karkat squeezed his sickle tightly, expecting death. " _Come on!_ " He roared, cannon-loud, as a 6 pound sphere of scrap iron rammed through the dire wolf's neck, immediately bursting into a deadly hailstorm of shrapnel, blooming like a flower in the monster's skin. There was another loud _BOOM_ , this time not overtaken by the desperate yelling of a frightened halfling, ramming more broken pig iron chunks, searing-hot, into the stump where a front leg once was, bursting into orange-red fire against the dire wolf's oh-so-flammable blood. Karkat craned their head to the side, same as their assailant, to see a small figure in the distance, loading another shot into the silhouette of a man-portable cannon.

Then, he heard it.

"Fire three!"

Neither combatant had even a bare moment to think as the sailing cannonball struck the dire wolf directly in the forehead, bursting into more disused scrap and broken parts and failed smeltings, punching deep rivets and gouges into the monstrous wolf's head, clipping an ear clean. The wolf stumbled backwards, growling, recoiling, as flame, hot, scorching hearth-flame, consumed its fur, filling the air with an acrid stench and the scent of burning hair.

It didn't even get close.

"Fire four!"

* * *

"Are you alright? Do you have brain damage?" She asked, gently helping John up from the ground, until they were sitting, leaned against an unfamiliar cart.

"That's not a very nice thing to say to someone you've just met!" Sir Strider woozily shot back, leaning against a crate of bedrolls and jerky and hardtack, gesturing slowly towards the new arrival. She turned around to look at him in a very odd fashion, adjusting the huge goggles strapped to her face by turning a small dial of some sort on their left side.

"What? I need to make sure she's not concussed, or worse. I don't have the equipment to deal with a bleed here, we'd need to rush her back to my cabin and deal with that immediately." She replied, pulling a tiny little device out from her leather apron, similar in fashion to the one Karkat wore in town, now neatly folded and stowed away into another crate. She shook it back and forth, creating a loud, noxious sort of repeated clicking sound, and then twisted the top clockwise, creating a bright beam of torchlight light from the tip as something inside the device cracked and ignited.

"What do you know about medicine, cannon girl?" Karkat angrily challenged, stomping forward to push her out of the way. "And don't call John a "she"."

"Uh... What don't I know?" She replied, pointing the bright light at Karkat's eyes until he stumbled backwards, sputtering. Then, reaching forward with silk-gloved hands, she pried John's eyelids open, shining the light into them, gently tilting it back and forth, watching as they tracked the light. "Alright, he _looks_ like he's not concussed at least. Situation normal for his eyes as far as I can tell. Get your horse moving, we're gonna walk and talk."

"Not a he, either." John groaned. "I'm sort of. Figuring that out right now. They's fine."

"Whatever, I don't care what you've got going on, I do care about you dying, which I'd rather not have you do considering all the effort I just spent preventing that." She brushed off, pushing the light into John's hands. "Here, you hold this. All of you should probably get back on your cart, I'll go grab my cannon and walk with you." She said, and John did indeed hold it, albeit barely.

"Do you have a _name_ , cannon girl?" Karkat asked - really, sneered, more than anything, as he and Sir Strider both helped John to their feet and into the back of the cart, Karkat joining them shortly thereafter. Karkat figured they'd sit there for a couple of minutes before she realized that his horse wasn't going anywhere, and they'd have to make camp for the night, which he figured would be a particularly satisfying little social victory.

"Of course I do. Jade Harley. You're Karkat Vantas, and you have my parts in your cart. I don't know who these other two are, I imagine bodyguards, or possibly your lovers? I don't really care. Are any of them damaged? The parts, I mean, not your two... people. I have your payment with me right here if they aren't. If the parts aren't damaged." Jade rattled off, her voice immediately accelerating in speed as she grabbed what looked to be like a very small cannon, fitted into some sort of complicated metal-and-wood armature and replete with straps to attach to someone's arms and shoulders for bracing. "If they are we can still work out some sort of deal but I do definitely need those lenses above all else, if those are messed up we're going to have a problem, buster."

"Wait, hold on, _Jade_ Harley?" Sir Strider asked, gently patting John on the head while he still thought the squire was too dazed to notice. Wiping some ash off his rusty armor, he gestured a sword towards her. "What, are you Mr. Harley's daughter or something?"

"Oh, don't be so chauvinistic, grandfather. I live by myself. Those are _my_ parts. Mine. For _me_." Jade asserted, dragging the cannon along, the whole assemblage strapped to her back like a backpack. "Do I look like a "Mr. Harley" to you?"

"I mean, you signed all your letters with just "J. Harley", I'm not sure what you expected us to think?" Karkat replied, the comment going gracefully, and thankfully, unresponded to. Instead, as her small moment of revenge, she walked up to his shivering horse, gave it a couple of gentle pets across the snout, and got it to start walking forwards at a slow, ambulatory trot. "Hey, wait, what the hells?"

"What? Do we have _another_ problem, Karkat?" Jade tossed over her shoulder, taking her goggles off from her eyes and letting them rest on her bare forehead, accompanying what looked like a tremendous amount of hair pulled back into a distinctly inelegant, but functional, messy bun. Red rings of depressed skin and dark circles of tiredness surrounded her eyes while she kept a raised eyebrow at him. "Check my parts, for gods-sake! Devil's blood..."

Karkat sighed quietly, beginning to rummage around in the crates while Sir Strider walked behind the slowly moving cart, giving John plenty of room to sleep it off.


	11. Chapter 11

"...And that's the last of them. All present and accounted for. Scratchless, your majesty." Karkat tiredly mumbled, trying not to attract too much of Jade's ire. In the distance, dire wolves flit between branches and tree trunks, all flickering with green flame, but none of them quite as big as the one that had attacked them before, and none, seemingly, willing to attack Jade, or anyone close to her.

Jade was startlingly short for someone with such a tall demeanor, standing only about two inches or so taller than John (and thus about a foot taller than Karkat, give or take a little bit), with a presence that filled up any clearing she was in immediately. She was built like a middle ground between John and Sir Strider, with slightly broad shoulders, and very clearly, a strong back and arms, judging by the ease at which she slung around a man-portable cannon like it was made of feathers, but the rest of her still of a somewhat narrow, thinner sort of body. Her skin was dark and dappled with darker freckles, and her manner of dress was clearly more suited to a workshop of some kind than the battlefield, with a cloth blouse, a long cloth skirt that dangled to her ankles, and thick, protective leather gear - gloves, an apron, boots, elbow and knee pads.

"Great! Glad to hear it." She replied cheerfully, every footfall crushing a new pile of grass beneath the soles of her boots. She reached up, fiddling with her goggles a bit more, and decided to pull them off entirely, hanging them on a small, bent nail pushed through her apron from the back and flattened at the tip. "You've done me an invaluable service today, Karkat, and for that I will reward you as much as within my power to do so. How is John doing?"

Karkat grumbled a bit under his breath, a little discontented at how Jade was acting like they were all so familiar already, that they were already on some sort of first name basis - but there was money at stake, so he kept his mouth contentedly shut. Instead, he gave John a little nudge, quickly responded to with a quiet grunt. "Yeah, they're fine."

"That didn't sound like an "I'm fine", that sounded like a grunt. Most people will grunt if you poke them." Jade replied, reaching over to bump the cart off its path a little bit with an elbow, watching it lurch for a minuscule fraction of an inch off the ground before thumping back down. "John! Are you dead yet?"

"Nope! Not yet!" John replied, staring upwards at the forest canopy as it passed them by. Sunlight was powerful enough, bright enough to penetrate through the many layers of leaves, but moonlight, even at the highest peaks of the full moons, would never be able to seep in. It was dark, although the miniature torch John had been holding for a little bit (that Sir Strider reclaimed once it became clear that John was not in a position to hold anything, natch) provided more than enough light to see by. "As far as I can tell, I am still alive, and I very much intend on staying that way."

"Great! Glad to hear it. You can only die once we get back to my workshop, okay?" Jade asked. Sir Strider and Karkat both glanced at each other, unsure if they should be taking this seriously or not.

"Aye, sounds good!" John replied, throwing a thumbs up straight up into the air. They stuck their tongue out, even though Jade couldn't see it, and Jade replied by sticking her thumb up back at John.

"Excellent." Jade summates, before returning to silently walking, occasionally adjusting the thick leather straps that hold her cannon to her back. The walking goes smoothly, if silently, Jade leading the pack, occasionally guiding Karkat's horse with a gentle touch to the nose to get it to move in a certain direction - past the clearing, there's no real paths, only the following of Jade and Karkat's compasses. Occasionally, the cart has to maneuver around a particularly dense patch of trees, or past areas of ground where the roots have begun to swell up and over, making the ground too uneven to lead something with wheels on through.

"So, uh... Mrs. Harley, how exactly does this light of yours _work_? I've never seen anything quite like this before. Normally I just make my own fires through devilry, or a normal person's torch." Sir Strider asked, after an uncomfortable ten minutes of silent trodding through the forest, accompanied only by the sounds of cicadas and the occasional low, booming growls of dire wolves in the distance, stalking prey.

"Oh, it's, well - how much do I have to dumb it down?" Jade asked, flicking her head over her shoulder a moment to look at Sir Strider, her face pulling into an odd, pleased sort of buck-toothed grin.

"I don't care." "Many tons, please!" called out the two voices from the cart, while Sir Strider shrugged his shoulders. "I like to consider myself a man of a decent education."

"He knows econimity!" John jeered from the interior of the cart. "And snowflakes!"

"I do, indeed, know of econimity, and snowflakes." Sir Strider repeated. "I should be more than intellectually capable to handle your technical explanations."

Jade laughed, fiddling with her goggle dial with a free hand. "No you aren't."

"Excuse me?" Sir Strider replied, more shocked than angry. He even lifted his visor up, just for a minute, to get a better look at Jade, even as she turned around and began walking backwards (rather easily) so she could look at him more clearly.

"Not an insult, you just aren't. Not even my papa gets it, although that's because he's not very smart either. There's just a lot of complicated math I couldn't really explain with just my fingers, a lot of foreign numeral bases and stuff like that. Complicated engineering. Maybe like fifty other people in the world get it and you aren't one of them." Jade rumbled out, matter-of-factly, while she continued to smoothly waltz through the forest completely backwards, like she had memorized every small intersection of trees.

"Numeral bases?" John asked, entirely purposefully, lacking any sense of innocence.

"It's when--" "So, like, normally you can count from zero to ten, and that's what we call "decanary", after the Old Common "Deka", for "Ten", right?" Jade interrupted, more than loud enough to basically shout over the more reasonably-volumed Sir Strider's attempt at showing off his academic prowess. "Right," She continued, not waiting for an acknowledgment. "Sometimes people call it "Denary" but that's besides the point, and I think that's stupid. Anyway imagine you are a species with six fingers on each hand instead of our five, so if you were to count on your hands you'd count to twelve, not ten. Except twelve by itself is already two digits, one and two, so you can't just go "eleven, twelve", because that sort of... implies higher numbers? Like, the number represented by a "one" followed by a "two" in a twelve base system is actually our fourteen. Anyway, this is called "duodecinary" and it's not very relevant."

"Why would you even need to do that?" John asked, eager for more knowledge even if they didn't understand it in the slightest.

"Dunno." Jade replied, matter-of-factly. "I was lying when I said foreign numeral bases had to do with my torchlight, but there is complicated math, just different math. I just wanted to talk about math. Is that alright? I do a lot of thinking about math. And talking about it."

Sir Strider let his visor click back down. "I imagine none of us would mind you talking about math, but I'm still very interested to hear in how it works. The torch, not the math, I understand how math works. I don't like it very much, but I do understand it... functionally enough."

"Oh, do you? Can we talk about axioms later? I have this really big stack of parchments I've been working on to try and provide a rigorous definition of addition, it's a thing I think a lot of other people take for granted, maybe we could look over it sometime?" Jade asked, ducking down to avoid a low-hanging branch that she was not able to see when she ducked. Sir Strider bent down a little earlier than she did when it came time to approach. "Also, do you know any publishers? I'd love it if I could get my notes all bound and printed even if I just got a single copy for myself."

"I can't say I do." Sir Strider lied, reaching back to tap his sword's hilt, just to make sure it's there. "And I'll... have to think about the axiom offer."

He was very much not interested in admitting that he had no idea what an axiom was.

"Well, try to think about it quickly because I probably can't keep you all more than overnight. My papa gets kind of testy when boys stay over." Jade responded, having gone from fiddling with the dial on her goggles to taking them off their assigned nail and repeatedly twirling them around her fingers. "Anyway, you wanted to know how the torch worked, right?"

"Yes, please, gods!" Karkat yelled, throwing his hands up in exasperation. "We're all _dying_ to know."

"What, like, literally? I... don't really know how that's possible. John, are you all dying?" Jade asked, idly pulling on her lower lip with her free hand.

"No, we're fine, I think Karkat was exaggerating. Were you exaggerating, Karkat?" John asked.

"It's called _figurative language_ , you... Ggrrguughh." Karkat tried to think of a scathing enough insult in time, only to just end up devolving into a vaguely animalistic grunt. "Can you please just tell us so we can move on from this line of conversation and put it in the ground where it so duly belongs?"

"Well, it's mostly lanternfly extract mixed with a small amount of cooking oil and some other stuff, along with a little piece of flint and some metal and some other stuff. When you shake it, it feeds some air in and the fluids emulsify together thanks to some small pebbles inside the tube that help stir it, and then you twist it really sharply and that drives the flint into the metal mechanism to create a spark that ignites the fluid. There's some insulation to keep the heat inside and it only lasts about an hour and a half and if you cover up the air feed you'll kill the fire pretty quickly and probably create a small vacuum as the fire consumes the rest of the oxygen inside the device which would be not fun for whatever appendage you've put near the air feed and it will probably also burn you? Don't put anything near the air feed, basically. What I'm really working on is to see if there's a way I could attach more tubes without sufficiently ruining the form factor - if I could fit double the amount of other stuff and increase the oil by half again I could reliably triple the light time to about four hours but having too big of a tube makes making the casing obnoxious and also causes the emulsion to leak out very reliably in testing, which is obviously bad because it destroys the rest of the internal mechanisms even worse and makes it way harder to reliably ignite." Jade rambled, continuing to walk backwards for most of it, up until the last sentence or so, where she turned back around so she could face the trees. "Which is bad, of course, because if I want to sell these then they need to be reliable otherwise someone's liable to use one and have it fail at a crucial moment, which is bad. I would prefer to have minimal sentient blood on my hands if at all possible."

"I think that's a very reasonable thing to want. I don't want to see dead people as a result of my actions either." John replied, while Sir Strider simply stared, silently, mouth slightly agape, in Jade's direction.

"Right? That would be very bad. I would be very upset if someone died trying to rely on one of my inventions. That's why I rely on mine myself in the testing phase! Nobody left to be upset if I mess up." Jade replied, laughing loud enough to disturb some birds nesting overhead.

"That's... grim." Karkat quipped.

"No, it's factual!" Jade responded, tapping the side of a nearby tree once. She slipped her goggles back onto the hook in her apron, gesturing ahead with her other hand. "We're almost there. Please do not mistake my papa's incoming rudeness for any sort of dislike of you. He's not very nice to anyone except me and his old mates."

"Right, well, I'll try not to be offended so long as he doesn't make fun of my height. No guarantees if he does that." Karkat responded, adjusting in the back of the cart. In the distance, a soft, rhythmic... almost wheezing sort of sound could be heard, while the trees thinned out, growing fewer in number.

"Why would he do that? It's not like your height is something you could control." Jade replied.

" _Thank_ you! Someone gets it!" Karkat shouted, as they rounded the bend around a particularly large tree, coming into view of a rather large tower embedded firmly into a clear-cut area of the woods. Clear cut enough that, for once, the canopy broke, revealing slivers of the moons above through narrow gaps in the leaves, casting a little bit of visible light down - and just in time too, as the miniature lantern in Sir Strider's hand crackled and fizzled to a sputtering halt. There was one last gasp of bright light, and it flared out, now useless in Sir Strider's hands.

"Yeah, they'd probably just make fun of you for being an ornery little shit." Sir Strider joked, whistling as he approached the tower, putting one hand above his eyebrows and staring up at it. Hissing metal pipes seemed to pump steam through it like the veins of a body, while smaller valves fed into an array of lanterns, keeping the place lit up with a soft, orange-red glow. "What a beaut. You build this place yourself, too?"

"No, only the mechanical parts. Papa and his friends built the place to hide away from the law for a bit and then when he retired and adopted me I helped renovate it!" Jade said, grinning toothily, finding nothing wrong with the things she just said. She lead the horse over to a small external door set in the ground, before walking over to the front door and giving it two hefty knocks with her knuckles. "Papa! We have guests!" She yelled, presumably loud enough to be heard through the thick wood, before turning to the rest of the group. "You three can head inside, I'm going to pack the merchandise in my workshop and you get John somewhere more comfortable than the back of a cart, 'kay?"

"Yeah, sure, whatever." Karkat grumbled quietly, hooking an arm around John's waist and pulling them up to their feet, prying them out of the cart.

"Need any help with that?" Sir Strider asked, while Jade reached into the cart to grab the box of lenses and heft it up by herself with a little grunt.

"No, I'm good! Take care of your friend, don't worry about me." Jade replied, flicking her head backwards for a moment towards the front door, hearing it begin to creak.

"Oh, you best worry about her, if you know what's good for you." Came a thick, rasping voice from the front door as it swung open. "Get inside before you become monster bait, graveyard stuffers. I'll get you some water. Don't expect anything else."


	12. Chapter 12

The two adventurers and the halfling they were guarded were all far too tired to question much. For a moment, Sir Strider considered biting something back at the half-shadowed man, but then John started dizzily stumbling towards the door and Sir Strider decided that perhaps it would be for the best to hold his tongue for a moment and tend to his compatriot. If you had asked Sir Strider what he was thinking when he scooped an arm around John's back, and John's arm around his shoulders, he would've told you that he was helping his squire, and nothing more. Karkat wasn't nearly as banged up as the other two, and gladly took up point as if this was some sort of new exciting assignment. "Yeah, yeah, out of the way, grandfather." Karkat grumbled, immediately receiving a metal hand in his hair, gripping it tightly.

Then, up in the air he went, the door opening further now that both hands keeping it partially shut were occupied. Karkat squirmed around in the air like a kitten, the lanky, scarred man behind the door effortlessly holding him up by the hair. John and Sir Strider both winced quietly at the pained yowls coming out of Karkat's mouth before the man's sole natural hand grabbed the back of Karkat's clothes to give two points of contact. "Listen here, kid. I allow you in this home as a favor to my daughter. Disrespect her hospitality at your peril. Are we clear?"

The man stared Karkat straight in the face, having lifted the halfling high enough that they could literally see eye-to-eye. He wasn't particularly tall, maybe an inch taller than Jade or so, nor did he look very strong, but his face, rough with stubble and decorated with a thorough layer of scars, mostly from blades and stitches, belied his experience. A single simple eyepatch was strung across his right eye, with the largest, most visible scar going vertically through it, decorated with white stitch-marks. His hair, thin and straight, was mostly grey, the occasional streak of pepper-black rolling through it, off-pale-olive skin beginning to sag slightly with age, a positively ancient looking open-front robe laying still over patched-up sleepwear. "Clear?"

"Crystal, sir." Karkat growled, and was let down gently back onto the ground. Something in John sort of expected him to do something vicious and mean, like punt Karkat fifteen feet away, or drop him from three feet up, but no - he made his message clear and put Karkat down. "Why the hells did you have to yank my hair like that, pox-balls..." He mumbled, and the man reached down again with his... armored? Armored hand, reaching out from the sleeve of his robe. When Karkat slipped out of the way, the man sighed and rolled his shoulders.

"I don't think it's right to a man to not look him in the eye when we talk, and I don't _kneel_ to anyone not named Empress Elizabeth. Would you rather I put you up on the nearest shelf, halfling boy?" He growled, otherwise not making any movement to stop Karkat from careening past him and into the cabin-tower. "Come on, you two, get inside. Your friend looks like he's been kicked by a horse."

" _They_ smote the front leg off a dire wolf." Sir Strider explained.

"Ah." The man said, stepping aside and giving John a wide berth as Sir Strider helped carry them slowly into the cabin-tower.

The interior was, graciously, warm - while it was hard to tell outside, especially not strapped up in so much armor and leather, the rapidly lowering sun had begun to fill the air of the forest with a noticeable chill. The interior of the cabin was nothing particularly crazy, outside of the pipes and tubes and other strange gizmos creeping up the sides. It had stairs, it had a big table, it had chairs. A small, messy tapestry, coated in finger paint, tarnished and weary with age, hung over a nearby window like a curtain. A small bed, fit for one, was crammed into the corner. A stone fireplace crackled with heat, burning logs and twigs sending smoke up a wide chimney, while some kind of strange, glowing fluid pumped slowly through clear glass tubes in the walls, coating the interior of the cabin-tower with light.

"Over here. Put 'em on my bed, I'll get them some bread." The man said, flicking his armored hand back over his shoulders towards his bed. Sir Strider didn't really feel like being lifted up by the hair today, so he just brought John over to the man's bed and gently laid his squire down, helping pull their legs up onto the cushion and prop their upper body up with some pillows.

"Where's Jade sleep?" Karkat asked, looking around the simply furnished interior with a prying sort of eye, craning his head up as far as he could to look at the balconies above, wooden support pillars stacked on each other at slightly odd angles in a way that looked distinctly unstable, if you knew nothing about carpentry. Once Karkat's eyes narrowed in on the nails, though, his heart-rate slowed back down. Yes, it still definitely looked crazy unstable, but all the strange metal struts that Jade had presumably installed seemed to be balancing most of the weight against each other - that, and a bunch of pipes that Karkat quickly puzzled out actually had no use and did not flow from anywhere to anywhere else, but were instead just more supports, pretending to be pipes. Aesthetically pleasing. Clever.

The man sat down on a nearby stool with a loud grunt, air forced out of him in the process. He reached up with his armored hand and adjusted his eyepatch, slowly, carefully. "In the workshop, usually. Why do you care? Not going to be sneaking into her bed, will you?"

Karkat looked at the man like he was insane. "Why would... No. I don't think I would ever want to, either. There's a bed down there?" He asked, gesturing towards the stairs, which continued down into the floor after a small landing on this ground level.

"No, she usually sleeps at her desk." The man responded, matter-of-factly, throwing a small loaf of bread at John's chest, which they accepted with a quiet little grunt on impact. John sat idly in the corner, head aching, rest of their body aching, slowly picking off pieces of bread, trying to make themselves as unobtrusive and quiet as possible. A little nibble of crust there, a little nibble there, like some sort of small, garden-dwelling creature, until a big enough hole was made that John could ignore the remainder of the awful crust and dive straight for the delicious bread-meats on the inside, ripping them out with gusto, making a big crumb-y mess on the bed. The man turned around on his stool to stare at John until they slowly began to notice and stopped eating. "What? Don't stop on my account. I'll clean up later."

"I have a question, Sir--" Sir Strider chimed in, with the man's neck whipping around so quickly it almost seemed like it snapped.

"No "Sir". Just Slick is fine. None of that." Mr. Slick replied, waving his clacking hand about dismissively.

"Right. Where do you intend for us to sleep?" Sir Strider asked. Mr. Slick looked at him a couple of times, before raising his eyebrow.

"I don't care. There's probably some cushions somewhere. Maybe Jade has something for that. Not my problem." He grumbled, running his hand through his hair, giving it a quick brushing with short clipped nails.

"Hey, what's with your arm? Do you need it for swordfighting or something?" John asked. Karkat, who had gone quiet, studying the man, narrowed his gaze. Something about the name "Mr. Slick" rung too familiar to him to be shrugged off, but he couldn't place it in his memories. Either way, he glanced at John, too far away to effectively tell John with his face "that was a stupid thing to ask", but that didn't stop him from trying anyway.

Mr. Slick turned back around on his stool to face John, and immediately popped his arm out of the sleeve of his robe, causing John to yelp. He waved it around a couple of times, and then slowly, kind of frustratedly, managed to cram it back into his robe, pulling back his good arm into said robe so he could fiddle around on the inside. Evidently, popping the arm on and off was worth the inconvenience if it meant he got to spook people every so often with it. "Yes, I need it for swordfighting."

"How does that work?" John asked, clasping their hands over their cheeks in a playful mixture of awe and fear. Karkat and Sir Strider convened over by one of the other chairs, muttering something out of John's range of hearing, and then the two of them began ascending the stairs together, evidently, looking for something.

"Iunno, ask Jade." Mr. Slick responded, grumpily enough. He got up from his stool, pushing it away, and walked over to the window to look out from it while a new set of footsteps began ascending the stairs. "Jade, how's my arm work?"

"Barely, with complicated engineering! Who wants to know?" Jade replied cheerfully, looking up the stairwell and waving at Sir Strider and Karkat.

"Kid does." Mr. Slick answered, pressing his nose against the glass of the window to watch the outside - for monsters, presumably, although John wasn't certain of that.

"The kid's name is John, dad! John what, actually?" Jade asked, walking over to the bed John was resting in with a small crate in hand. By the time she came close enough that John could peer into the mysterious crate, they could see that it was stuffed to the gills with bandages, herbs in glass jars, and vials of liquid, mostly viscous and sludgey.

"John Egbert! Child of Father Egbert, but it's not a big deal." John exclaimed, immediately waving their own preemptive fame off. Jade just looked at them a little funny as she grabbed one of the vials and popped the cork off it.

"I don't know who that is so I'm just going to trust that he has an actual name that's not "Father" because naming your dad "Dad" seems kind of silly to me. Drink this." Jade rolled out of her mouth, forcing the vial into John's hands, and then immediately grabbing both of them and folding them together and basically just puppeting John around so she could force the foul-smelling herbal liquid down their throat. John gagged quietly, face clenching and tensing up with an immense amount of distaste and discomfort, swallowing what they could. It tasted like a mixture of grass and dirt and burnt bread, and John was not entirely unconvinced that all three things didn't somehow compose bits and pieces of the mixture they had swallowed, the sticky, syrupy mass clinging to their tongue like a fairly unwelcome slug, or some other bothersome, flabby creature.

"...That's because he's a priest, Jade. You call priests "Father", like how you call academics "Doctor" and empresses "Your Highness"." Mr. Slick answered, his prosthetic limb resting silently against the glass of the window, his head just barely tilted towards the two of them. He grabbed the cloth curtain attached to the window and tugged it shut. "Father James Egbert, wasn't it?"

"Yeah!... Did you know him?" John asked, quietly, in between protesting "blech"s and "bleh"s, wiping their tongue on the back of their gauntlet to try and replace the earthen taste of medicine with the sharp, acrid taste of metal. Jade quickly and quietly started undoing the straps of John's armor, removing all the pieces on their arms and legs, setting them to the side of Mr. Slick's bed.

"You could say that. We've met." Mr. Slick answered, turning his head back to completely face the window.

"Get your own chestplate off, I'm not getting that close to anything not a limb." Jade muttered, reaching into her crate to grab some small little cloth wipes. She uncorked another vial and trickled a couple droplets of something profoundly foul-smelling onto it, far sharper than the mild, quiet scent of metal. John reached up and began undoing the straps on their chestplate, slowly and gingerly prying it off of themselves and then just sort of dumping it into the pile, followed shortly after by their pauldrons. Jade reached out and rolled up the sleeves of John's underclothes, dabbing at small scrapes and cuts and bruises with the wet cloth - and John _hissed_ their displeasure loudly. "Oh, quiet, you baby, it doesn't hurt as much as losing a limb to sepsis."

"What _is_ that?" John asked, about to ask Mr. Slick a question, but distracted by the sudden stinging pain of Jade's cleaning.

"Sepsis? It's a malady of the body caused by dirt and foul miasma accumulating within open wounds, causing them to fester and degrade until you end up losing a limb or dying." Jade explained, helpfully. When John made a face at her, she realized she explained the wrong thing, and playfully stuck a tongue out as if to silently pretend she was joking. "This is pure alcohol. Alchemists need it a lot more than I do, but I'm told by people I trust that it delays sepsis and other such wound-borne maladies from occurring, usually to the point of allowing them to heal completely before anything worse than just the initial cut happens."

"Like the kind people drink in bars?" John asked, incredulously. In their periphery, Sir Strider and Karkat returned from their trip up higher in the cabin-tower with armfuls of pillows, tossing them over the railing, into a pile on the floor, while Mr. Slick muscled past them, in some sort of slow, shuffling hurry.

"Yes, except more pure in concentration. I don't know how alchemists do it, alchemy is not my strong suit, I just buy the stuff. Don't drink it." Jade admitted, shrugging her shoulders as she started cleaning up the bumps and knocks and tiny slices on John's face, making them wince with agony at each little wipe. "Had to get help from a friend with the formulation for my little torches. I'm more of a maker."

"Mmhmm." John replied. "What's up with your dad, did I say anything to make him mad?"

"Hmm?" Jade asked, turning her head around left, then right, unable to see Mr. Slick in her immediate vicinity. She glanced down at her goggles and then shrugged. "Probably. He's pretty testy. I'm sure he'll have some words for you in the morning."

"What do you mean? Isn't he gonna sleep in his bed?" John asked.

Jade laughed at John quietly while Sir Strider and Karkat arranged cushions and pillows, and Sir Strider began to remove his armor, for the first time in what felt like forever. Jade set the alcohol-soaked cloth aside and began grabbing some small bandages, wiping some kind of sticky looking herbal goop from a vial onto them. "He only goes upstairs when he doesn't feel like sleeping down here. You rest. I don't want you, like, exploding if you need to do that again tomorrow. Hold still."

"I don't think I'm going to - nghhg, hells! What is _that_?" John asked, exasperatedly. "For someone trying to fix me you sure do seem to be causing me a lot more misery!"

"It's medicine, you crybaby. It's very sticky and it will help pack the wound and keep the bandage adhered to your skin. There's already some adhesive on the bandage, that I made myself, but this will make it really sticky. It'll dry up and fall off once it's ready." Jade explained, bopping John on the nose a couple of times before covering up their worst cuts with more sticky bandages, each one making John wince, until they were fully patched up, feeling much like a stitched-together shirt.

"Are we done?" John asked.

"Yep! If you need me, I'll be in my workshop!" Jade replied, poking John on the nose again. "That goes for you too, boys!"

"Huh?" "What?" Sir Strider and Karkat replied, each one talking over the other, consumed in their own little conversations.

"I said I'm going to be in my workshop if you need me!" Jade repeated, a little louder.

"No, you said "If you need me, I'll be in my workshop!". Right?" Karkat repeated, doing a kind of scarily uncanny imitation of Jade's rough, pitchy voice, except a little rougher and pitchier and scratchier.

"Why did you say "What?" then?" Jade asked, immediately matching Karkat's imitation, although hers was just a bit more mocking.

"I needed some time to figure out what you just said!" Karkat challenged, furrowing his brow. "Go to bed, or whatever. I'm tired. I'm going to pass out now. Later."

"Go to bed?" Jade asked, having meandered her way over to the precipice of the stairwell landing, preparing to descend to the basement. "Why would I do that when there's so much work to do?"


	13. Chapter 13

Karkat stared upwards into the dizzying balconies above. At some point, someone hit a little switch, presumably Mr. Slick, and the glowing tubes in the walls all began to dim and slow their flow. Like water from a slowly freezing stream, from a thick flow to a heavy dribble and then to mere droplets of the glowing liquid. Where there was once an appreciable level of light allowing one to move about without stubbing the everloving shit out of their toe, now there was only darkness, and a dying lantern somewhere above. "Go to bed!" Mr. Slick yelled downwards, not visible beyond the layers of wood and metal struts, but certainly present.

"Make me yourself, you old rotten bastard..." Karkat grumbled, grabbing the cushion he had stolen from the upstairs of the cabin-tower and slowly pulling it closer to Mr. Slick's bed, currently occupied by a tired John. One of the very good little benefits to being a halfling, Karkat mused to himself silently, is that one could use a pillow or two as a very functional mattress. "How are you holding up, Egbert?"

"Hmm?" John replied, slightly groggy but no worse for the wear. At this point, the worst of the pain had subsided, and they were feeling pleasantly floaty, their mouth dry and stuffed, like they were chewing on cotton. Hells, their entire head felt more than a little bit cotton-y, to be fair. "I'm alright, why do you ask?"

John could almost hear Karkat rolling his eyes from the annoyed little grunt that worked its way up the halfling smithy's throat. "Because you used enough holy magic to completely erase the leg of a dire wolf? That stuff isn't free. It pays its toll on you."

"How would you know that?" John asked, slightly deliriously.

Karkat scooted up, from lying down on his pillow into a slightly more stretched out, sitting position, so that he could glare at John. There was just enough dim moonlight filtering in through the windows that, at the bare minimum, John could see Karkat turning towards them, although not the exact annoyed expression on his face. "Egbert, you remember who my father is, right?"

"Oh, right. He was good at holy magic. Wait, do you know holy magic, Karkat?" John asked, slowly rolling over onto their side with a slightly pained grunt. Despite whatever it was that Jade had fed them, it couldn't completely remove all the pain from their system, only dull it, paper it over with downy fluff like sheep's wool being stuffed into them. John rolled over, just enough that it would be slightly easier to look at Karkat in the eye - or, at least, where John thought the his eye was.

"No, I never had the talent for it. That, and the whole "father being killed" thing happened before I was old enough to learn anything useful. I just plied my trade elsewhere." Karkat explained, lowering his back so that he wasn't completely holding himself straight, which was starting to wear on his spine a bit. "My mother was never really involved in my life very much."

"Aye, I'm much the same. I'm sure my mother exists, or existed at some point, but she's never been there. It's just been me and my father for quite some time. Say, speaking of, your father, was he--" John replied. Karkat knew, almost as soon as he saw the way John's body language visibly perked up, that he was about to say something stupid, and took an educated guess.

"My mother was the halfling, my father was a half-halfling. Which I suppose makes me three quarters halfling. Three-quarterling, one could say." Karkat replied, chuckling quietly in the dark. He went back to lying down, letting himself relax onto his selected pillow with a slight smile. "I used to be quite a lot bit more bitter about it. Very enraged at the world, the way I had to fight my way up for respect."

John laughed. "Are you saying you're not angry anymore? That's a bit of a lark if I've ever heard!"

Karkat thumped the bedframe with one hand. "Don't put words in my mouth, Egbert, or I'll hack your legs off. I'm still going to be angry at a world that wants me dead, I've just got a better handle on it now."

"What?" John asked, concerned. "Who wants you dead? You seem a perfectly agreeable fellow to me."

Karkat laughed, deep and bitter like a poorly made cup of tea. "Oh, you don't know how good you have it, Egbert. There's not much room for my kind in the world. You have those rabid human supremacists, who would very much like all the halflings to piss off back to our little mountainhomes with the dwarves, and then you have the people who think my existence as someone with half-blood makes me a blight on society, and then you have the rabid Dersite separatists who'd gladly wring my throat for being the son of someone remotely important to Prospit. No, I'm afraid there's not much room for me anywhere."

"Is there room in Alekhine? Nobody's giving you trouble up here, are they?" John asked, worried, leaning over a little further in the process.

Karkat smiled ever-so-slightly even though he knew John couldn't see it in the dark. "I'd like to think there's room enough. Nobody gives me much trouble, and if they do I'll break their ankles."

"What, pray tell, is it with you and people's ankles?" John inquired, rolling back into the bed and flopping back with a loud, obstinate sigh, slowly rubbing their aching limbs.

"They're in reach." Karkat answered simply. "Good thing to threaten. Nobody wants to get their ankle lopped off, it's a distinctly unpleasant sort of injury. Even a cut to the hamstrings is one of the worst things that can happen to you, and I am in a unique position to leverage that fear to get people to do what I want via threatening them bodily harm."

John laughed again, slightly louder this time, but still being quiet to avoid drawing the ire of Mr. Slick. "That is certainly a way to get people to do what you want. Have you tried asking politely, though? I find that often works wonders for me."

Karkat grunted wordlessly. "I'm sure it does, human. Who'd be willing to say no to a Prospitan knight, a human, if they just asked politely? When I ask people politely they act like I'm leprous. I've tried being that kind of person, it's just not for me."

"That's a shame." John replied, rather suddenly a great deal more solemn and quiet than they were a moment ago. "I think you're a perfectly reasonable person, and would gladly do as you ask if you asked me politely."

"It's not your place to demand politeness, Egbert. Imagine if you lived your entire life underneath someone's heel - in some cases, quite literally. Do you think you'd have the patience to be chastised for not being "polite enough", or do you think that sort of thing would get very old very quickly?" Karkat replied, knocking Mr. Slick's bed a couple more times with his fists to make sure that John got the memo.

"I mean... I can't imagine it would be very pleasant, no." John mused, quietly turning away from Karkat.

"Right, no, pleasant is about the opposite of what I'd call it. I'd rather gargle a man's piss than deal with people chastising me for not being "polite" enough. If threatening to hack off someone's ankles gets me what I need in life then I will threaten every man, woman, and child's ankles, and maybe some day when fewer people would like to kill me for the crime of being alive, I will no longer need to do such a thing." Karkat replied, flashing a sickle in the dark, scraping the blade slowly against the edge of Mr. Slick's bed. He slowly wiggled out of his apron, his toolbelt, all of his various pieces of equipment, until he was just in the soft, quiet clothes beneath, setting all his sundries aside.

"I hope so too." John replied, almost whisper-soft.

"I'm glad you think so. Say, that warpick - d'you still have it?" Karkat asked, turning around on his pillow so he could face John. He couldn't see, despite having adjusted to the darkness a great deal, the way John shook their head in response, so instead he just waited for verbal confirmation.

"No, it died, so I just left it in the woods." John answered, huddling up into a little loose ball.

"Right, I expected as such. Very pretty, don't get me wrong, but absolutely a display piece. I'm startled it even lasted you this long." Karkat replied, reaching over to his toolbelt, metal scraping sounds ringing out in the quiet cabin-tower interior.

"Thanks for the kind words, Smithy Karkat." John replied, drolly, rolling their eyes.

"Shut up, I'm about to make your life better." Karkat said, finding what he was looking for among his tools and gently lobbing it onto Mr. Slick's bed. It landed on John with a muted thump, prompting a slightly pained groan from the squire.

"What was that for? That wasn't my ankles!" John whisper-yelled, reaching down to grab whatever was thrown at them, preparing to fling it back.

"Shut your gob, lord almighty. I am _giving_ you a _hammer_ , as thanks for saving my life, and because I think you deserve one. This hammer is a halfling hammer, which means it is by far and away better than any piece of trash you will ever put your hands on barring something made by a better halfling than I, of which I can guarantee there are very few." Karkat explained, grabbing one of the pillows and cramming it beneath his neck for a little bit more support, just to make life that much easier for himself. "Won't break, won't bend. Seems suitable for a bright young... knight such as yourself. Consider it a good omen from yours truly."

John picked up the hammer by the handle, looking at it the best they could with the lack of light. "Oh." They said, slipping it under their pillow for safe keeping. It would probably be easier to give it a good once-over in the morning light. "Uh, thanks, Smithy Karkat. That's quite generous of you."

"Don't mention it. That being said, I am going to go to bed now, and unless you'd like a very angry halfling trying to do irreversible bodily harm to your legs, I'd recommend you hush up and do the same." Karkat replied, turning over, pulling a small blanket over himself.

"Yeah. Right. I'll uh. I'll get to that." John said. "G'night, Karkat."

"Night, Egbert."

| 

Sir Strider sighed quietly, leaning against a nearby workbench, watching Jade scrutinize some metal parts with a small little scope of some kind. There was a little click somewhere in the distance, and all the lights in the room, the glowing tubes in the walls filled with burning fluid, all began to slow their stream of light to a halt. "Oh, one second, I think papa turned the lights off." Jade noted quietly, getting up from her stool, boots quietly thumping against the grey stone floor as she walked to the wall closest to the stairs. She pulled up a small wooden panel attached to some hinge, reached inside, and gave something Sir Strider couldn't see a small little tug. "He likes to shut all the valves at once as his way of telling me to go to sleep, so I rigged it so that my workshop has separate tubes... No tattle-taleing!"

"Wouldn't dream of it, Mrs. Harley." Sir Strider answered, watching as the workshop slowly dipped into darkness outside of Jade's small lantern, and then, as the tubes and valves opened back up, it slowly swelled once again into a dim, steady level of light, washing over the room.

"What's with that? The "Mrs. Harley" stuff. And "Squire Egbert" and all that poppycock. We have names, you can just call us those, right?" Jade asked, walking back over to her workbench and scooping up a bunch of parts with her gloved hands, dumping them out from Karkat's crate onto the workbench. Sir Strider had no idea, really, what she was making - something long, narrow, and mostly wood. "I mean, like, first names. Obviously we have last names too. You're allowed to just call us by those, this isn't some sort of royal court."

Sir Strider shook his head, grabbing a nearby stool and pulling it close so he had at least something to sit on. He folded both his arms into each other and then against his chest, armor parts scraping slightly against other armor parts in the process, and let his head come to rest against the wooden table. "It's just what I was taught, Mrs. Harley, like how I'm sure your father taught you how to be a crass and rude little lady."

"And another thing!" Jade replied, bapping Sir Strider on the helmet with a thin, narrow piece of metal, producing a satisfying tinny ring. She immediately did it twice more just to listen to the noise, not seeming to really care too much about Sir Strider's actual answer. "Why do you call me "Mrs."? I'm not a married woman, nor do I intend to be any time in the near future. If you're going to insist on this absurd honorific thing, you might as well call me by the correct one!"

Sir Strider recoiled slightly, not at all hurt in the tiniest bit by the bonking, but still a little aggrieved by it nonetheless. "Is "Mrs." not the default? I was always taught to assume that young women of marriageable age were to be assumed married, and if they wanted you to know otherwise, they would gladly disabuse you of the notion."

"Where's your sword?" Jade asked, rather abruptly. Sir Strider blinked a couple of times at her and then pulled out his broken blade for her to examine. Promptly, she grabbed it by the hilt and whacked Sir Strider on the helmet with the flat of his blade before dropping it onto the floor. "As I said, I have no interest in becoming a married woman at any time in the near future. Nor am I particularly interested in getting to know anyone, man or woman, in that fashion anytime soon. If you're going to act like a slavering mutt in my workshop I'm going to insist you leave."

"Ow." Sir Strider quietly mumbled, reaching down to grab his sword and strap it back to its hilt. "That wasn't very nice of you, Miss Harley."

"There we go, that's the right way to treat a lady." Jade teased, flicking Sir Strider's nose. "And don't let me ever catch you forgetting it!"

"With what opportunity?" Sir Strider whined quietly, rubbing his forehead, fingers squeezing their way underneath his helmet. "It's not like we'll be seeing much of each other after this bounty is over and done with."

"Why do you say that, sir knight?" Jade replied, picking up some small metal tools of indeterminate use from a drawer in her workbench and beginning to slowly poke and pry and twist and fiddle with the parts she had been given.

Sir Strider looked at her quite funny. "I don't intend to be coming back to the middle of a forest absolutely crawling with dire wolves that nearly killed me on at least one occasion any time soon. Not exactly thrilled about that one, I'm not."

Jade laughed, like she was sharing some hidden moment with Sir Strider, albeit one that he seemed completely unaware of. She didn't turn to face him, just continuing to tweak metal parts about, little bolts and latches and curved pieces that locked into each other just so, while she spoke. "I'm sorry, I thought it was clearer - I'm going to be coming with you guys back to wherever it is you came from."

"Alekhine--" Sir Strider replied, sort of automatically, before quickly following up with "Wait, what? No you aren't."

Jade turned her head to look at him, slipping her goggles down her face and tweaking the dial until they narrowed to a tiny precipice. "Yes I am. You can try to stop me, if you want."

Sir Strider reached up, pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand, until it almost hurt. Almost pinching hard enough to leave a tiny little bruise, but not quite at that level of agonized pressure. "Why in the devils' name would you like to come with us? It's not like we do much of note - we have bad dreams, get drunk, repeatedly injure ourselves in combat. The pay's not particularly great. Nobody's getting rich off this, and I'm sure wealth is a motivator for you, considering what you've said about selling your inventions. Miss Jade, I do implore you to reconsider."

"Hmm. No." Jade responded, tilting her head and grinning as she turned back towards her work. "Nobody's going to hear about me if I sit in my workshop and make little tinker-toys. I need to go out and sell my product, see the world, experience strange new locales, taste all the foods I've never tasted before. Every bird has to leave her nest sometime, you know?"

Sir Strider sighed dramatically, leaning back into the crook of his arm.

"Plus, you said something about bad dreams? Why would that be particularly relevant?" Jade asked, suddenly stopping all her movements and little device-fixings. "Dreams aren't statistically unnatural, nor are bad dreams. That's a thing that happens to everyone, at least as far as I'm aware. Right?"

Sir Strider blinked at her a couple of times, very slowly. "Yeah, I was making a glib in-joke, don't -- don't worry about it. It doesn't mean much of anything." He said, convincing nobody, not even himself.

Jade furrowed her brow. "I'm not an idiot, Sir Strider. Don't lie to me."

"I'm not! It's nothing. Truly. Forget I even said it." Sir Strider pleaded.

Jade's neck cracked as it whipped towards him, hair splaying out around her, and for a moment, she was quite a fair bit larger than she had been before. Whatever tie was holding her hair together into a bun had loosened itself enough that it could no longer contain her immense quantities of hair, letting it cascade angrily down her face. "Sir Strider, you are lying to me. I may not understand particularly well the niceties of the social contract but I do believe you owe me a little more than that. I will not "forget it". What sort of odd dreams are you and your compatriots having?"

"My dreams are a private place, Miss Harley. I'm afraid you'll have to hire a mage if you'd like access." Sir Strider protested.

"It's statistically relevant, if you're bringing it up to the conversation to begin with. Tell me or so help me gods I will fire a cannon ball at you. I am not joking. It will hurt." Jade fired back.

Sir Strider's body visibly sagged, like all the air had been let out of him. He reached up with both hands, rubbing his temples, clearly aggravated beyond measure. "Knight Egbert dreams of a vast ocean, and I, of the world in ruins, pressed together like some sort of disgusting court art. The last night, the two of us met in a single dream, and we were both slain by Becquerel Black. The--"

"Yeah, I know who Becquerel Black is. Anyway, that's impossible." Jade replied, turning her head back to her work. "People don't just up and wander into other people's dreams on a whim. You need magecraft for that. That means there's somebody where you two slept who is a mage."

"You don't seem like one to quickly write off something as impossible so quickly, Miss Harley. Is there something _you're_ not telling _me_?" Sir Strider replied, enjoying the very small moment of conversational upper hand he could acquire.

Immediately, it was punctured. "Yes. I've also been in that place in my dreams and, last night, was slain by Becquerel Black. It was not a very comfortable dream. That is why I am insisting that it is impossible, because I am sure the conventional limits of magic prevent such mind-magery from being conducted across such long distances." Jade admitted freely. "Therefor, I find it absolutely twice, no, thrice as necessary to accompany you three so that we may investigate this phenomenon further. I don't know magic, but I do know people that do. We'll track them down and find them posthaste."

Sir Strider groaned like he had been struck, laying his head down on the workshop table. "Fine. Whatever. You win."

"Oh! I didn't know this was a competition, but thank you for letting me win nonetheless." Jade replied, grabbing her semi-completed device and giving it a good look-see. A long, wooden frame containing what seemed like an elongated cannon barrel, along with some other twisting mechanical parts attached to the hindquarters of it. She pulled a small metal piece repeatedly with her finger, each time causing a tiny little hammer-like metal piece to clap down on the end of the device, whereupon she needed to manually pull the hammer back to produce another click. "Very nice, glad to see that works." She muttered to herself. Turning to Sir Strider, she smiled and patted him on the head quietly. "Do you want me to go and grab a pillow for you so you can get some shut-eye down here?"

Sir Strider waved her off with one hand, tired and frustrated. "Sure. Do what you like, Miss Harley."

"Great!" Jade replied excitedly, getting up from her seat at her workbench so she could gather some pillows for Sir Strider. "I'll go ahead and take care of that. Don't wait up for me, just find a place you like and get some shut-eye in. I imagine we'll be having lots of long days ahead of us!"  
  
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	14. Chapter 14

"And who is this, my Empress?" Jack asked quietly, blade drawn, defensively held in front of the throne, interdicting between her and their guest. The halls of Derse, glittering obsidian black, were decorated with the looming, judgmental glares of Empresses long past, all of them human, all of them leering down at the visitor. Jack Noir had been to Prospit, three times in his life, and each time, he found it wanting, albeit for separate reasons. The first time, he wasn't impressed with the gaudy golden decorations, the smiling faces in each imperial portrait, the brightly lit halls, glistening with sunshine. The second time, during the war, he despaired at the lack of competition he was given, how easy it was to cut down every soldier in turn. And the third time, he found the negotiations, the terms inherent in the peace treaty to be lacking, at best.

But Jack was a bodyguard. It was not his place to dictate the terms of the treaty. Jack's task was a simple affair - kill as necessary. It was much better than his previous life, doing drudgework, parchmentwork for the old queen. When she finally kicked the bucket, and the staff was reorganized for the war, it was as if his entire life had changed for the better. Finally, to be recognized for a skill he possessed, rather than a skill he was forced into by arcane organizational standards. He didn't want to maintain the archives and approve permits and scrip.

Jack wanted to fight, and he was damn good at it.

"Stranger! Identify yourself!" The Empress, Elizabeth, shouted - forcefully, impressively so. Jack could always respect the pipes on her. She may have been fifteen years his younger, but he would never forget how quickly the burgeoning princess turned herself from a petty half-pint to a force of nature once her time for the Queenship arrived. Trained in diplomacy, assassination, sleight-of-hand - she was everything the ancestral Dersites could've wished for. And perhaps some of those pansy neophytes were okay with a weak Empress like Marie, but Jack, one of the old guard, he knew what he liked. A forceful Empress. She gestured a blade towards the approaching figure. No scepters or staves for a Dersite Queen.

The man - the knight - did not identify themselves. They stalked forward, eyes filled with bright green, simmering rage. Their armor, charred black from some sort of firey abyss, gave them the countenance of a wolf, pointed sides of a helmet, a broad stance, long arms. They slowly dragged their blade along the ground in its scabbard, a narrow handle with no visible hilt, a pointing hand emerging from the opposite end of the blade, pointing towards the Empress, accusatory. In their free hand, they carried a thick burlap sack, dripping with something dark, brown-rust colored.

Jack and the Empress crossed blades, Jack's guarding her from attack, the Empress's pointed towards the figure's heart. The knight strode up to them, silently except for the clacking and clicking of their armor plates pressing against each other with each slow, shambling movement. He did not raise swords to them. Instead, he threw the burlap sack at the Empress's feet, revealing the head of Kankri Vantas, days old, rolling along the ground like a ball before stopping on its back, face stretched outward into a calm expression of mute horror and acceptance, almost perfectly untainted except for a couple of small flecks of dried blood.

"Jack." The Empress instructed quietly, as the knight turned away and took a single step forward. Jack drew his blade, a long flamberge, from its scabbard, keeping one hand on the hilt and the other on the handle.

"Halt!" Jack shouted, and the knight stopped moving in its tracks. It tilted its head, slowly, over its shoulder, until Jack could see a single green flare in its helmet, staring back at him. Undeterred, he raised his flamberge higher, pointing it at the knight's visor. "Do you know what you've done?"

The knight turned sideways to face Jack, both hands resting on the handle of its blade. It bent its head down, just enough to visibly size Jack up, and then nodded.

"Prospit's going to demand their magician back, knight. Our peace, however tenuous, is built on mutual trust, respect for justice, martial honor. You've violated all three today, and so, you will not be leaving this room in anything other than chains or a coffin." The Empress said - shouted, really. There was a shuffling behind the pillars as guards slowly flooded into the room, clogging exit paths, holding spears and shields, cannon fodder for the consumption. "Jack, apprehend him."

"With pleasure, my Empress." Jack replied, withdrawing his elbows closer to his body, sliding his hand down from the hilt to the handle. The knight turned towards Jack, and, with a pop of its thumb, withdrew its blade from its sheath. There was a loud clatter of steel against steel, and Jack rapidly began losing ground, his shoes slipping along the floor as the knight pressed him back with a single arm. Their sword was clearly of foreign make, a curved blade with a single cutting edge, and an ornately dressed handle wrapped in gold thread and cloth. Its horizontal grip pressed the blade against the vertical grip of Jack while it walked him back into a nearby pillar.

Then, without movement even seen, its knee was in Jack's gut, and then it wasn't, and he was coughing up blood, his chest burning. There was a loud, cracking _snap_ as a sideways kick cracked two of Jack's ribs, and then, at the slightest instance where his grip sagged, the knight pushed his flamberge back. There was a moment of stumbling, where his grip weakened against his better judgment, against all his training as a bodyguard, and the knight's sword caught his own, a two-handed sideways yank flicking it out of Jack's hand, sending it clattering against the floor. The Empress watched quietly, her own longsword held at the defensive.

There was a rippling woosh of air. Jack's arm fell to the ground, severed cleanly near the elbow, and then a second kick to the face, pull the knee back, snap into a third kick in the ribs, twist, change position, a fourth kick - straight on, sole of foot in chest - to the ribs sent him spiralling into a nearby sculpture of glass hard enough to shatter it.

All told, the sequence of motions took little more than thirteen seconds. The knight turned away from Jack, wiping the blood splatter on its blade against its scarf before flipping the sword around by the handle and slowly putting it back into its sheath. Jack groaned quietly in pain, rolling on the floor, his layered armor preventing the glass from working its way into the rest of him, but still grievously injured. The Empress grit her teeth together, watching the knight, prepared to fight for her life to defend herself if need be.

The confrontation never came. Instead, the knight silently walked past the pillars, past the guards, towards the large double doors - the same way it came in. A single guard, spear and shield in hand, attempted to get in the knight's way. There was no conflict beyond that. The knight drew its blade, and the guard fell to the ground, dead, unable to even mount the ghost of a defense against its strike. Once more, the knight wiped its blade clean on its scarf, return its sword to the scabbard, and then proceeded through the doors uncontested.

After that day, Jack's arm never healed. Maybe it was something with the magic on the knight's foreign blade, or maybe it was something mysterious, fateful, but no amount of devilry would re-attach Jack's severed limb. Even the best holy magicians, summoned from the Prospitan court in an exchange of favors, could do little more than cauterize the wound.

Without the ability to wield a blade or a quill, Jack had become useless in the only two things he had ever done. Despite her pleading for him to stay, this feeling of ceaseless inability continued to grind at him.

One day, he disappeared from her court. Empress Elizabeth never saw him again.

* * *

"Wow!" John shouted, just loud enough to bother the Mr. Slick standing nearby, adjusting the large-framed glasses on their head until they found a comfortable fit, resting somewhere on the bridge of their nose. A face festooned with small cloth bandages courtesy of a morning treatment from Jade, and then, an even bigger gift from the young inventor. John looked around, the entire world sharper than it had ever been before, catching details they had never noticed in their lifetime. The grain of wood, the particular sheen of metal, the wrinkles in Mr. Slick's face, the bright shine in Jade's eyes. John looked around and around, gently wandering in circles while their face fell into joyful, blissful awe. Their hands kept reaching up, pushing hair out of their face, brushing it behind their ears. They blinked a couple of times.

"Do you like it?" Jade asked, hand-cannon slung behind her back, the larger, bulkier prototype left downstairs in the workshop. The group had awoken at roughly the same time, although Jade never went to sleep in the first place, and John was the last to welcome themselves into the morning, with the grogginess-inducing medication swimming through their veins. After a light breakfast of leafy greens and bread, they stood together, preparing to disembark back to Alekhine. "I had some spare lenses lying around so I figured it would be worth making sure that you didn't just need vision correction, and weren't actually cursed by a witch. What's this say?" Jade asked, holding up a parchment riddled from top to bottom with dense mathematical symbols, markers of symbolic logic. John looked, and saw nothing but writhing black worms against the paper.

"How the hells should I know that?" John asked, shrugging their shoulders. "I mean, probably it says words and phrases like most papers I've seen in my life, but, like most papers I've seen in my life, it is also crawling and writhing like an anthill being invaded by earthworms. They're just clearer now!"

"Lovely mental imagery, Egbert." Karkat snarked, idly polishing his sole remaining sickle with a small rock, the other one left embedded in a tree quite a ways back.

Sir Strider let out a loud cackle in the singular, something like a "Ha!", dripping with smug success. "I told you they really were cursed by a witch! Pay up!"

"You two made a bet on whether or not I could still read after I got glasses?" John asked, rather suddenly unamused, lowering their face in Sir Strider's general direction.

"Yes." "No." Sir Strider said, suddenly humorously afraid of retribution all of a sudden. John brandished their new hammer, gleaming and rusty, making Sir Strider flinch just enough to bring a solid grin to John's face. "I would never, Squire Egbert."

"I'm going to trust Jade on this one, and insist you pay me the money that I just earned you." John replied, grinning.

"What? No!" "Okay!" Jade answered, taking a couple of steps forward to deposit a single coin in John's hand. John eagerly clasped their fingers shut, dropping the coinage in their little pouch before reaching up to adjust their glasses once more. "Fair's fair!"

"That's not fair at all!" Sir Strider whined quietly, leaning against the door.

"Are you kids going to git anytime soon, or am I going to need to chase you all out with a sword?" Mr. Slick grumbled angrily and loudly, waiting for the opportunity to have his much nicer bed back so he could sleep a good night's sleep without the interference of some unwelcome boy-guests and without having to worry about his adoptive daughter blowing herself up in the dead of night. And, having the good bed, that was also worth the rush. At his proclamation, everyone not named Jade let out a little yelp of surprise, the lot of them having mostly forgotten that he was even in the room with them. "Out, out with you!" He shouted, waving a small kitchen knife about in the most threatening of a fashion he could muster. Perhaps if the child of the man he despised wasn't busy scuttling about in his home, he would be a little less impatient about removing these guests posthaste.

"Are you sure you want to come with us, Jade? What we do isn't exactly easy." John asked once they returned to the ground from their upward, startled leap, strapping the hammer to their belt, walking with Sir Strider towards Jade's front door. Jade nodded vigorously, before dashing right to Mr. Slick and throwing a powerful, almost dizzying-looking hug in his general direction. John turned their head back to watch the interaction with a wan little smile, one hand grabbing the other arm's wrist. Sir Strider and Karkat, not wanting to burn anymore time around someone they already feared, instead took the opportunity to step outside for fresh air and to start feeding Karkat's horse some breakfast leftovers.

"And you, little miss, you make sure to send a crow at least once a month, alright? Otherwise I'll have to set the boys on your trail." Mr. Slick growled protectively, ruffling Jade's hair in a manner that sent it flying every which way, thoroughly mussed and destroying all the effort she put in brushing it before waking up. Jade pressed her face into Mr. Slick's chest before pulling away and giving him a little pat on his metallic arm, enough to make a dull, choppy ring-thud.

"Of course, papa!" Jade replied, adjusting the strap on her hand-cannon and beginning to walk towards the open door, her new traveling companions waiting impatiently for her by the barely-visible cart, horse gently nuzzling into Karkat's open palm.

"And no canoodling! None of that!" He shouted at her once her foot crossed the threshold outside.

"Of course not, papa!" Jade yelled back, smiling, slamming the door to the cabin-tower shut behind her.


	15. Chapter 15

Things, generally, were calmer in the morning in forests like this, with no need for torches or devillight or little miniature suns kept in a metallic tube to light up the air. Instead, while still dim, the sun itself gave you all you need, in little yellow-orange rays that filtered through the moving, waving sea of leaves, casting long, streaking shadows across the grass and dirt. With every gust of wind that poured through the clearings and branches, the leaves all shifted, imperceptibly with just one but in larger, broad patterns when accumulated among their thousands, changing the tilt and timbre of every stray ray of light. Karkat’s horse slowly trod along familiar ground, following a trail only it could really detect. Karkat and Jade’s compasses both steadily pointed backwards, towards Jade’s home, which had quickly faded away in the distance.

In the cart, Jade and John both lay slightly uncomfortably, propped up against the edges of the cart and sleeping off their respective maladies soundly. For John, that would be the undeniable thrashing that the backlash of their forest-shaking smite brought them, and for Jade, that would be the fact that she stayed up very late and was now sleeping it off into the morning-afternoon, as she usually did every day of her life, a malady called “being underslept”. With all the various parts and glassware deposited safely in Jade’s workshop and then thusly abandoned for her little adventure, there was enough room in the cart for one more person to occupy, which was currently taken up by a single Sir Strider, with Karkat walking slowly and steadily behind the cart, keeping pace fairly easily.

In the distance, various animals, the typical kind you would expect to see in a forest like this, all flit about, doing their daily business. Deer bounded between trees, searching for food, while rabbits and squirrels scattered about, giving the cart and its inhabitants a wide berth. Overhead, birds of all colors and shapes threw themselves from tree to tree, branch to branch, woodpeckers chattering, buzzing their beaks into firm bark. A single crow, the sole corvid seen that day, dove below the leaves for a moment, nearly striking Karkat in the head during its downward descent, before flapping its way back up into the leaves and vanishing. Karkat, for what it was worth, let out an aggravated little shriek and waved both hands helplessly about, trying to whack it out of the air, but to no avail. "Accursed little shits. Rats with wings"

"Wouldn’t that be bats?" Sir Strider asked, lightly scraping at his broken blade with an oiled cloth. He didn't have much else he'd be doing for the trip, considering it would be eating the rest of the day in its entirety, so he might as well get some maintenance in when he can. His blade had been accumulating some assorted detritus over the past couple days of monster slaying, so, time to scrub. Lightly. "I've never heard anyone associate crows with rats before. Seems a bit off."

"I'm not sure how you _couldn't_ make the connection. They're both scavengers, they're both very friendly if treated right, both highly intelligent. I think comparing rats to any other flighted animal seems a bit bloody spurious." Karkat explained, gesturing skywards with his still raised hands, putting them together to make a mock bird flapping to playfully pick at Sir Strider.

Sir Strider shook his head, sheathing his now-cleaned (mostly) sword in its scabbard, and then pulling a strap over it to help hold it in place. After all, a sword that was only half its original length had an unfortunate tendency to slip out of any full-sized scabbard if not tended to properly, and Sir Strider was _very_ attached to his sword. "But they're of completely different breed of animal. Crows and the rest of the dutiful black-feathered birds are flighted, unlike rats, which stay helpfully landbound, and they possess feathers and eggs, while rats give live birth and are coated in a fine layer of fur. On the other hand, while bats are flighted and rats not, bats possess fur, living young, and the same healthy voracity for fruit that I've seen from many a rat - not to mention the same propensity for dark, hidden places." Sir Strider retorted, bringing his best rhetorical chops to a farcical conversation that deserved precisely none of them.

"Pigeons." A dazed, half-asleep John commented, staring upwards into the shaking canopy of trees. Karkat and Sir Strider both immediately looked up, on the same wavelength - _are we about to get attacked by a flock of pigeons?_ \- but a moment's silence confirmed that, no, this was John's way of attempting to contribute to the conversation.

"Pigeons?" Sir Strider asked, rubbing his chin. "Pigeons are like rats with wings…?" He quietly mused, rolling over the idea in his head. John let out a quiet little grunt in affirmation that it was indeed, the intended meaning of their comment. "No, I don't think I can buy that one. Apologies, Squire Egbert."

"I think it's a better comparison than bats, but, no, rats are absolutely akin to crows of the land." Karkat concluded. "Toss that bag here, Strider. No, the one on Jade's lap."

Sir Strider grabbed a small satchel of food that Karkat had bargained with Mr. Slick for earlier in the morning and tossed it towards the halfling, who caught it fairly easily, before lying back into the space in between John and Jade, looking upwards towards the sky through his visor. Karkat sped up his pace a bit, walking past the cart and towards his horse, while he took some of their leafier lunchfoods and fed them to the eagerly awaiting horse. After a couple of seconds, Sir Strider decided that there wasn't nearly enough room in the back of the cart to lie down like this, even without the boxes, and sat back up with a quiet grunt of effort. "What's that horse of yours named, anyway?"

"That's none of your business, Sir Strider, and her name is Ironhoof. She was a conscientious friend of my father's, and has treated me faithfully in these long years of her life." Karkat answered, reaching up as high as his short arms could go to give the horse a pat on the side. She was not particularly tall, bred for halfling riders, after all, but she was stout, powerful, and reliable, black fur and mane streaked across with long, dry strips of greying hair. "She's been a most reliable companion, unlike many other fairweather friends I have encountered in my short lifetime."

"Friend?" Sir Strider asked, tilting his head over his shoulder to stare at the horse, while Karkat fed her out of her hand. She didn't even need to stop walking, although the pace did slow for a bit while she chewed and swallowed thoughtfully. "I've definitely met some animals I've been on good terms with, but you speak as if you can talk to the horse, and her, back. I wouldn't quite call them a friend."

Karkat sighed, rolling his eyes while he finished feeding Ironhoof her lunch. "I'm not surprised by that, no. Your culture isn't accustomed to seeing the animals in your service as equals deserving of respect. I doubt you'd consider seeing a warhorse after a long campaign to be returning to the comfort of a friend."

"I've never ridden a warhorse, so I couldn't answer you." Sir Strider responded, turning his head back to the side. Sideways enough that it would be easy to be heard, but not so far back that he'd have to continue straining his neck. "Most animals and I don't get along very well, and it's not like I have a family pet to fall back on in times of comfort."

Karkat slowed his pace, while Ironhoof increased hers, falling back to a place where he could talk to Sir Strider with a little more ease and comfort. At this time of day, neither one of them felt it necessary to do more than the bare minimum watch for monsters, as typically, the sunlight forced them back into the hidden places in the forest, their shrouded dens where no sentient could walk alone, unaided. They were free to converse with each other, gently prising out what little information the other was willing to share, perhaps from curiosity, perhaps some sort of intellectual jockeying for position. "That's a shame. Did your parentage refuse the simple pleasures of a pup or a cat? It would certainly explain your odious disposition, to be raised without that sort of positive influence in your life." Karkat asked, taking the opportunity presented for a snipe.

"That's not very nice." Sir Strider replied, grabbing hold of the edge of the cart and dropping himself out of it. Karkat didn't wince away from the other man, but Sir Strider wasn't in the mood to start fisticuffs with his employer for once, and so the two simply passed each other by. "Seat's yours, my arse hurts."

"I bet." Karkat quipped, passing him by and grabbing hold of the edge of the cart so that he could haul himself up into it. He wiggled about left and right until he was comfortably situated between the legs of John and Jade.

"Since it behooves you to pick at my every scab and sore until they're bleeding, I don't have a family to begin with." Sir Strider replied, with an odd sort of monotone joviality, riding along the bare edge of sarcastic timbre. Not the content of his message, but his emotions about it, hidden behind that sliding visor. "I mean, I'm sure I popped out of some wonderful person's womb at some point, but they were never known to me. I was raised by one of the Queen's Brothers, Brother Strider. Loving-kindness was never quite on the list of foodstuffs offered."

Karkat would've spat-take if he had food to do so, but instead, he blew an incredulous-mocking raspberry at Sir Strider. "That's a load of horseshit. The Brothers were abolished after the last war - I would know. My father was part of those talks."

Sir Strider looked Karkat over for a moment and shrugged his shoulders in a most nonchalant fashion. "You seem a little young to have been sitting in on peace talks, but what do I know. Maybe they confused you for a royal toddler."

Karkat spat in Sir Strider's general direction, clearly aiming to miss. "Step on a rake and piss your britches. He kept notes, like any wise man would. I studied my history to stay abreast of the world I was born into. The Brothers were _disbanded_. It would be damned difficult to maintain peace when one side has an amoral paramilitary arm conducting targeted assassinations, and the other has a castle full of _priests_."

"I don't know what to tell you, then. I was raised by Brother Strider, by my lonesome. My own research has led me to believe I may have been born into a branch of the Lalonde family, but that's in the air. Maybe there's a happy, healthy Mrs. Whatever-Dave-Strider's-Last-Name-Is and a Mr. too, hanging around somewhere in a Dersite village, wondering whatever happened to their poor son. Maybe there isn't." Sir Strider responded, shrugging. "I'm not particularly plussed about it. Maybe someday I'll understand this animals-as-friends thing you strange folk have going on. Maybe I won't. Life goes on, nonetheless."

Karkat groaned quietly and flopped back into the space between John and Jade's legs. Unlike the much taller, person-sized Sir Strider, he fit rather snugly there, able to stare upwards at the waving parade of leaves above them. Much like Sir Strider, however, he immediately felt a sense of slightly awkward unease at his position and sat back up. "Lalonde like Roxy Lalonde, the innkeep?" Karkat asked. 

"Aye, the very one." Sir Strider amusedly replied.

Not finding a good opportunity for a snipe in there that wouldn't feel like it was encroaching too far on another person's honor, Karkat instead swiveled back to the prior topic. "That's a shame - about the pooch situation. If we ever meet again after we get back, I'll have to get you a dog."

"Aw, for me?" Sir Strider asked, raising his visor up so that Karkat could see his quirked eyebrow very clearly.

"Yes. I will get the bitiest, meanest, most curmudgeonly dog I can find, because it is what you deserve, and nothing more." Karkat spat with as much venom as the gesture of friendship could offer. "Wait, why doesn't Brother Strider just call you up one? If he's so true and real and part of the Queen's elite, it should be child's play, would it not?"

Sir Strider kept his eyebrow raised and then let his visor lower back down on his face. "Would it not, indeed."

"Oh, horseshit." Karkat hawked. "You better elaborate unless you want a sickle to the thighs."

"You'd have to reach them first, little man." Sir Strider mocked, without missing a beat.

"Of course, I have every intention of starting with the ankles, you rancorous snot. Finish your yarn lest I pluck it from your throat. Your believably is already riding on thin ice, what with the "son of a Brother" jest you think you are pulling over my eyes." Karkat growled, leaning forward, leering at Sir Strider - evidently, not enthused about being left hanging.

"There's nothing more to tell, I'm afraid! My Brother and I are no longer in touch. He never took the opportunity to gather for me a pup or a kitten while we were, and now, the opportunity will likely not arise again. That's the end of the yarn. The thread stops here." Sir Strider said, with his tone inconsistently wobbling between joking and dead-serious, to the point where it was impossible to pick up on which side of the metronome it ended up falling upon in the end.

Karkat let out a loud, frustrated grunt and was immediately met with the butt of Jade's hand-cannon being swung into his forehead, eliciting a louder, more pained grunt. "Ow, shit, what was that for?"

"You two are _so_ loud! Would it kill you not approximate the volume of screaming hawks when you have your stupid married-couple arguments about completely asinine things nobody cares about?" Jade mumble-yelled through mostly-shut lips, although the thrust of her complaints was plainly audible. John let out a little noise and turned away from the two of them, curling their head into the corner of the cart. Karkat began to respond in some protestful way, but was immediately met once again with the butt of Jade's hand-cannon, smacking him across the forehead, and then once more, this time from above, bonking into the top of his skull.

"Watch the merchandise, you witch! You're going to give another one of us a concussion!" Karkat growled, trying not to raise his volume enough to draw her ire once more.

"John's fine, you ninny, and I'm not going to bash you hard enough to bust your head. Just give us some peace and quiet for at least another two hours, or I'll hit you again." Jade mumbled, pulling her hand-cannon back into her lap and wrapping her arms around it like it was a precious artifact, or perhaps a stuffed animal of some kind.

"What, you want complete silence? I'm afraid you'll have to bandage my mouth shut in that case, Miss Harley, I'm a talker. Have been since birth. Brother Strider couldn't shut me up." Sir Strider answered, instinctively ducking when she swung the butt end of her hand-cannon in his general direction even though he was a couple of yards away.

"Don't tempt me, Strider." Jade mumbled.

Despite the ineffectiveness of her threat, Sir Strider did, in fact, quiet down. Not by a large margin, but enough to let the two resting in the cart acquire their beauty sleep, while he and Karkat (quietly) argued about politics.


	16. Chapter 16

The town of Alekhine was cast in two shades of gentle moonlight, the sky rapidly darkening to a royal shade of fuchsia, every little living thing and rock and stone casting two shadows, barely offset, close enough to appear as one. Karkat, having woken up from a good, solid nap about half an hour ago, was busy leading Ironhoof to the stables to allow her to rest for a while, a job well done. Meanwhile, Sir Strider, John, and Jade, all started their curious trek together towards the inn, something that, at all other days, all other times, would be a completely mundane task. Simply put one foot in front of the other, and meander your way across the town square until you make it from the stables to the inn.

Clearly, today was not planning on being a mundane day.

At the center of the town square, two figures quietly stood, observing passersby by firelight - every playing adolescent sneaking out at night, every tired worker coming to smoke tobacco by pipe-flame. One of the figures, slender almost to the point of emaciation, was garbed in dark purple, fuchsia cloth, hanging over matte, blackened leather. The other, similarly slender, but about a foot taller, clearly more well-built, was dressed in almost the same attire barring a bright red cravat hanging loosely around their neck. The most striking thing about the two of them, of course, was the dull orange-yellow flames dangling from their fingers like will-o-wisps, the indelible technique of Dersite devil-flare.

Sir Strider immediately grabbed both John and Jade by the wrists and yanked, tugging them in between the two closest buildings, into the narrow, rain-soaked space between a musty wooden frame and a wall of stone brick. "Ow!" "Shit!"

"Hush now, you two." Sir Strider said, terse and quiet, almost throwing them behind him before popping the strand holding his sword in place off of its little button and tugging free his blade, digging his fingers tightly around the handle. "I have very little desire in seeing the two of you dead tonight, so if you value your existences on this mortal coil you'll hush up and stay hushed up. I am not joking. Shut your mouths and keep them that way."

Jade grabbed the strap of her hand-cannon and pulled it loose from her back, mixing her hands about it until she had it solidly gripped in a way that felt correct. Not much thought given to ergonomics, just mechanisms. "Uh, hello? Is there something I mmmff--" John began, only to be hushed quickly by Jade's hand being slapped over their face.

"Shh. What's the situation, Sir Strider?" Jade asked quiet-as-can-be, while John frustratedly mumbled behind her fingers for a couple of seconds before giving up and going a little bit slack. Jade removed her hand from John's face and reached forward to grab the forestock of her hand-cannon once again, other hand resting on the butt of the weapon, holding it like it was a spear she was about to impale some evildoer with.

Sir Strider looked forward with grim determination, pulling the visor of his helmet down and gently scraping his blade against the nearby stones, in some compulsive almost-sharpening ritual that was almost certainly not actually good for the sword's edge. "Well, telling you will put you in harm's way, so for once let's just accept what Sir Strider has to say without question and relax here in this alleyway for a bit until the problem goes away, aye? No asinine arguments tonight? From either of you two." He asked, sternness and concern blending through his voice in deeply uncharacteristic manners.

"You know I can't do that, Dave." Jade replied, bringing her hand-cannon closer to her face so she could look down its barrel towards the town square. Sir Strider pressed down firmly with the flat of his blade at the end of her weapon, with enough pressure to force her to lower it. "I can't help you with incomplete information."

"I don't want your help, I want you to hide somewhere safe and not come chasing after me or doing anything _rash_ or _stupid_." Sir Strider replied, pushing Jade back now with the tip of his sword, pointing it towards her head. Even with the very tip a clean break, completely flat metal sanded down to a harmless, blunt edge, it was never a comfortable feeling to have a sword gestured towards one's head - Jade backed away, slowly. "You too, Knight Egbert. Tonight there is danger in the air. Don't do anything like your typical mode of problem-solving."

"Sir Strider… What's going on?" John asked, squeezing their new hammer tightly with both hands, tight enough that the leather in their gauntlets was beginning to creak, ever-so-softly. "You saw those two men in the town square and _ran_. Do you know them?... Do they know you?"

Without looking backwards, Sir Strider's sword shifted position, pointing directly towards John's face now. "If you value your blood unspilled you'll never let these questions leave your lips again. Ideally, you won't think them, but we all know the vagaries of the mind are an unpredictable thing. Speak a vow of silence and allow your mouth to be bandaged shut forevermore."

"Dave…" Jade spoke, with a tone indicating heavy concern, her hand-cannon's tip pressed against the muddy ground. A gentle patter of rain, nothing torrential, just an intermittent, cooling spittle, began to strike the skin and steel of all around. Little raindrops, like beads of sweat, collecting on Jade's forehead. She ran a hand through her hair, pulling it back, fixing her bun as rainwater accumulated between its strands.

"Please, Miss Harley, cease at once. I'm not susceptible to the charms of perturbed women calling for me by name, nor men, for that matter. You two will stay here in this alleyway, ideally further back, finding someplace to hide, and I will deal with my problems myself." He ordered, reaching up with one hand to pull his helmet off and shake his red hair out of place, turning back to face them now with a clear, unobscured visage for the first time since he had met either. His eyes, a startling shade of bright red, his skin dotted with freckles running from cheek to cheek, red hair splayed around the sides of his face with the largest clump, in the back, tied together with a little knot of twine - nowhere nearly as large as Jade's bun, but still notable. It was striking, now, in the moonlight and the rain, just how young Dave looked, with only the tiniest shreds of blonde-red stubble climbing down from his sideburns, a thick, pale diagonal scar running from one cheekbone to the empty space above the opposite side's eyebrow. His countenance was cherubic, rounded off, sanded clean - innocent. "Don't follow, I beg of you."

John gulped quietly. "Is there anything we can do?"

Dave slipped his helmet back onto his head, spending a couple of seconds to fit it on right, pulling a strap back into place, wiggling the knot of hair about until it felt just comfortable. Then, he let his visor slide down with an audible _clack_. "No."

His hands squeezed his sword tighter, now that both of them were once again available to hold the hilt. He brought it up and prayed, quietly, over it - the bent, waving blade snapped free of its last three feet or so, almost closer to a particularly long knife with an oversized hilt than an actual sword, nearly exactly two feet of cutting metal. It was old, tarnished, aged - a blade that had seen horrific things in its lifetime, things it had never whispered to Dave, despite all his attempts to intone the eldest blade spirits in his little, private moments. Dave squeezed it tightly in both hands, and then dropped it down to his side, holding it with just one. "Destiny waits for no-one." He murmured, vanishing in a small cloud of dust.

John covered their mouth quietly, staring at the space where Dave was a moment ago in mute horror and fear. They hadn't known him for very long, little more than a week or so, but already, they could feel the pain in their gut, a particular kind of pain they had felt well before. They stepped forward, disregarding prior instruction, hand running along the cold stone wall, with Jade silently moving behind them, hand-cannon held low. She tapped John on the shoulder and pointed up, at the moving silhouette above them, crouched low to the rooftop of the stone building they were next to, and then John noticed the muddy boot prints against the brick, slowly being washed away by the steadily worsening rain. Dave, almost laying down on the roof, was corpse-still, not even acknowledging their presence, keeping an eye on the town square with all the tenacity of a hawk hunting prey.

Or, in this instance, keeping watch for predators. John continued to inch along the wall, a simmering feeling in their stomach beginning to crank itself into a rolling boil, until it exited in a burst of steam from the ears at the insistence of a particularly ornery voice. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Gerroff me, you stretching-rack'd bastards, I'll chop you to bits and use your blood for my steel!"

There was the gentle sound of someone small being tossed against the ground, with a loud, shuddering exhalation of breath, loud enough to echo loosely against the firmer buildings. John peeked their head around the corner, giving them just enough of a view of the moonlit town square to watch two figures, tall and looming and lit by devillight and unbothered by the rain, kneel in close to a fallen Karkat, scrambling against the dirt that was slowly turning to mud. They spoke too softly to hear, only knowing that they were speaking at all by Karkat's livid responses to whatever inquiries they asked - and these responses made John's blood run cold.

"Strider who? What makes you think I've got enough time or care in my blood to care about your milk-and-water little games? Get out of my face and let me grab my pint, you louses!" Karkat growled, more than loud enough for anyone in the square to hear. The halfling got up, dusted their pants off, and started walking away between the shorter figure's legs. He got all of five feet or so before the taller figure had him by the hair, yanking him roughly into the air while he kicked and squirmed. "What is it with you insane humans and my gods-forsaken hai--" He managed to get out before being _hurled_ into the cannon at the center of town, making it ring like a bell on impact with his shoulder, sliding down slowly before falling to the ground, stunned. John's fingers twitched. There was no way any person could handle being thrown into something with that force without breaking their shoulder, but a small part of them hoped that Karkat's lightness and small size worked in his favor. John's feet ached, they yelled, they screamed. Run, John. Save him.

John couldn't.

The shorter of the two figures approached Karkat, unsheathing a long, curved blade and pressing its tip up against Karkat's chest, slowly bringing it up to the halfling's chin and then pressing upwards with enough force to make him look up. They asked something that Karkat couldn't hear.

"Fuck your mother and her horse." Karkat answered loudly, immediately receiving a kick to the face in response, slumping over slightly before pulling himself back up.

"Enough!" Dave yelled from the rooftop. "Stop this insanity. Let the halfling go."

The taller one spoke in a voice that was dangerous, low, husky. Threatening. Loud enough, though, to be heard. A tone that nobody who spoke in could be using with good intentions. "If you insist, Nephew Strider. You hear that, halfling? Your little play-spat was about as effectual as the flatulence of a snail - Nephew Strider has decided that they couldn't bear to see you hurt anymore. How precious, it's like something out of my favorite fairy tales - the dashing knight and the ornery little shit he's fallen for."

"Choke on your entrails, pissmonger." Karkat growled, lashing out blindly with his sickle, hidden behind his back until a moment ago. It met steel immediately, the shorter figure blocking the attack with their blade.

"That wasn't very nice." They said, kicking Karkat in the face and then flicking the sickle out of his hands while he was stunned, before pinning them back up against the cannon with the tip of their sword.

"I said _enough_!" Dave roared, a massive yellow pyre forming in his free hand, providing far more illumination than necessary to see him clearly. "You've made your point. You've found me. To who do I owe the honor - Prowler, Hunter? Trekker? Treader?"

"What a curious array of names, Nephew! You may call me Sister Strider, and this is my sibling, Brother Strider." The taller of the two said, drawing a long, curved sword from her scabbard. Despite its size and apparent weight, she wielded it easily with one hand, tracing shapes in the dust idly as raindrops transmuted it to mud and grime. John's heart dropped, and they bit back the urge to shriek when Jade clasped onto them tightly, instead hissing air through their teeth.

"Oh, my gods." Jade mumbled.

"I thought… I thought Brother Strider was dead?" John asked near-silently, almost as if expecting Jade to have an answer.

"I don't… Brother this, Sister that, I don't understand? Who are these people?" Jade asked near-silently, almost as if expecting John to have an answer.

Sister Strider let out an almost haughty chuckle, balancing five small flames between her fingers on her free hand, juggling them about idly. "We've come to ensure your resignation is final, Nephew! You've taken things from the Empress that she finds very precious, that open knowledge of would be detrimental to her duties. We see you've abandoned your leathers and blade - a clever move to make yourself unrecognizable, but we can smell the stench of a traitor from ocean to ocean. You're easier to find than a lighthouse, no matter how hard you've tried to smother your gl--"

"Oh will you shove it up your arse, Sister? "Resignation" this, "traitor" that, there's no need to dress it all with pretty words - if you wish to slay me, well, my throat hungers for steel embedded, and it _starves_." Dave yelled, and in an instant, he was gone, and so was Sister Strider.

Then, the sound of metal striking metal sang through the rain-filled air.


	17. Chapter 17

There was nobody left outside. Nobody of note, anyway. Everyone that could've been watching besides those involved had retreated, to the inn, to their homes, to whatever building could hold them. These were simple individuals, who lived quiet lives in the mountain town - living, breathing, eating, playing, working. The gun at the center of Alekhine hadn't been fired in a very long time, and yet, the air felt like it was ready to ignite the wick on its lonesome, filled with a sort of unbridled pain and tension that hadn't been witnessed in generations. Children had to be held back from observing the singing sounds of steel against steel, aunt against nephew. At the door to the inn, Roxy Lalonde stared forward blankly, clutching the door frame with both hands while her assistant helped with the food of the worried masses sheltering from the combat and the rainstorm.

There was no way for the untrained eye to watch two of the Queen's Siblings dueling against each other. Such combat wasn't exactly unheard of in the lower pits of the Queen of Derse's fortress, where the devils chattered among themselves in amusement and the Brothers trained within their eyesight. Ancient superstition, believing that the devils bearing witness to your blood being shed pleased them enough to share more of their strength with you. In the colosseums and dungeons, frequently, David E. Strider would fail attempt after attempt, his body refusing the violence that was enacted upon him. He wasn't able to perform the mercury step with the same level of skill or expertise as his Brother, and so he was thrown against the brick and the rock, again and again.

There was no questioning today of the brutal efficacy of his methods.

Blink and you'll miss him, David E. Strider landed next to the gun, kicking up dirt, and vanishing without a trace. Landed on a nearby brick wall only to disappear a moment later. For a moment, you could see him, locking blades with Sister Strider in a thin clatter of metal versus metal, and the two of them vanished again. The other one, the shorter of the two, the new Brother Strider, idly guarded Karkat, their insurance policy for any foul play. He looked around, quietly, and then leaned against the gigantic cannon, keeping his sword held roughly at the level of Karkat's throat. "So. I bet you don't have much luck with the ladies, do you, Brother Strider?" Karkat growled, resisting the urge to kick at the man with the lethal weapon's shins.

"I like men." Brother Strider replied, matter of factly, his blade not budging one way or the other.

"I bet you don't have much luck with the men, do you, Brother Strider?" Karkat immediately repeated. Brother Strider tilted the angle of his blade just a little bit more, so it was held just a hair closer to Karkat's neck, not moving the slightest inch even in the steady drizzle of rain soaking the two.

"No, I don't." Brother Strider answered, his voice at the exact same intonation and volume as it was with his prior sentence, to an almost unnerving degree. Karkat got a good chuckle out of that one, at least, until the angle of the blade pushed a little more into his neck, threatening to give him the closest possible shave a sentient could receive in their entire lifetime. "Do you have any more asinine comments or will I have to cut your throat to make it stop making those little pissant squeals you call "insults", child?"

"Child? I'm probably older than you! How dare you talk down to me like that you little gnat, I'll gnaw your ankles off!" Karkat roared impotently against the backdrop of clashing steel, before a sudden press of cold metal against his throat caused his mouth to squeak shut.

"You probably are, and no you will not." Brother Strider replied.

"You can't be older than, what, 14? 15? You've barely got a lick of peach fuzz, you puny little caterpillar! I'll shave what's there along with the rest of your skin." Karkat continued, seemingly undeterred from his incredibly unwise decisions in the moments in which Brother Strider was not actively attempting to press the edge a little bit closer.

"Eh, close enough." Brother Strider said.

There was a loud _CRAK_ in the air, and a terrified voice shouting "Jade!", and Brother Strider looked down to watch as blood pooled against his leathers from a fresh, sudden new wound that had opened up in his side. The sound preceding it was entirely foreign, completely unlike anything anyone had heard outside of John in the little moments of fleeting childhood memory when dignitaries from the edge of Prospit brought back their strange and marvelous fireworks. It was the sound of the sky splitting open, carving a path through raindrops towards the enemy until it bit like a snake, the sound of a rock being cracked in two by a hammer blow, the sound of a very small lead sphere being propelled at very high velocities towards a royal assassin in training.

"Cover me!" Jade yelled, more than loud enough for the group to hear, while Brother Strider angrily retracted his blade from Karkat's throat only to immediately donkey kick him in the head, stunning him long enough that he could vanish into a spray of dust and mud without interception. It was organized chaos in the streets, the sound of swords clashing vanishing shut for a moment while a presence collected itself behind Jade Harley, bearing down on her with all the malicious force several decades of experience and a very sharp sword could bring. John was quick on the draw, but not as fast as Dave, muscling them out of the way and blocking Sister Strider's assault.

"I told you two to _run_ and _not get involved_ and this is how you pay me back? Truly, the worst of friends. I specifically requested the opposite of this!" Dave grunted through grit teeth, struggling to handle the strength of Sister Strider's sword swipes, even as she swung with only a single hand. John twisted around and swung their hammer towards her, striking one of the stone bricks in the tight alleyway with a loud, crackling chime when she vanished out of the way, while Jade desperately used a thin metal rod to stuff something down her hand-cannon, panting heavily. Dave and John twisted around each other, ducking to avoid each other's swings as Brother Strider and Sister Strider approached from both sides, from above, from below, swiping at ankles and feet with a dizzying amount of coordination.

"Oh, Nephew, you didn't tell us you had friends!" Sister Strider taunted from above, kicking off the wooden wall to aim the tip of her blade directly at John, scoring a perfect strike through the tiniest sliver of armor. John let out a loud, harsh wail while Jade's hyperventilation and frantic motion only grew more intense, Dave blocking the much slower Brother Strider's movements with relative ease. "And what's this she's got there, a cannon? How devilish, bringing a cannon to a swordfight, that's not in the rules!"

"Blow it out your arse!" Jade shrieked, swinging the butt of her hand-cannon towards Sister Strider while John grabbed her blade and pulled it closer, further into themselves, tugging her just off-course enough for Jade to actually land a solid blow on Sister Strider's hip, before she kicked off of John's torso and disappeared, ripping her sword out of John in the process with a spray of blood. Dave forced Brother Strider back with a heavy shove, only missing the follow-up vertical slash by a sudden kick to the face via an interceding Sister Strider, Jade quickly returning to loading her strange weapon. "John, are you okay?"

"I've had worse!" John roared, beating their chest with both hands, a loud rancour of metal on metal scraping through the air. Dave slid back several feet, stumbling left and right before vanishing with another perfectly executed mercury step, arriving immediately behind Brother Strider to kick him in the back and then vanishing again. Sister Strider took half a second to land on the ground, glowering at John with a sense of palpable malice and mercury stepping away. John swung over Jade's head while she ducked down, _hard_ , hitting one of Brother Strider's ribs with a loud _crack_ , his fresh wound spraying a new burst of blood in the process as he fell over onto his side, gripping his torso.

For once, John was the one doing the looming, pointing their new hammer Brother Strider-ward, a completely spoken threat. "Get out, and do not come back."

"Go blind and die." Brother Strider replied as he snapped his fingers, a bright white flare enveloping the alleyway, searing John's eyesight, destroying their hearing.

The only senses that functioned were auxiliary ones generally considered by many to be not very useful in the art of aiming at a moving opponent, or indeed, aiming at an opponent at all, if you were a human with a relatively insensitive nose structure. It was not made at all better by the fact that the rain had since become a torrential downpour, soaking the flattened dirt into deep, muddy wells and removing all scent other than rain and salt, drenching John's clothing, seeping into their armor, into their bone and soul. So cold, the sinuses clogged, rendering the sense of taste impotent.

All that was left was John's sense of touch, and it told them this;

John had just been skewered through the stomach, likely by Brother Strider's blade. John was moving backwards, trying to resist motion by planting their feet firmly into the muddy ground, slid further with someone's hand on their chest. Something about this all made John blisteringly angry, and their mouth began to move with muscle memory, their throat producing the vibrations indicative of one saying something important but without gifting the knowledge of what John was saying to their own brain. John felt a warm, then very cold pain blooming through their torso as the hard object lodged in it was removed, and then placed back inside them in another location, making that a total of three holes in their torso they had developed, followed quickly by a fourth.

John's eyes swam. Blindly, they reached out, grabbing the blade of Brother Strider's sword, and uttered something that they didn't need hearing to understand.

"AMEN!" They shouted, feeling the sword immediately snap into two pieces at their grip, grabbing the shard of blade embedded inside them, yanking it out, and smashing it against the nearby wall as their eyesight and hearing slowly recovered. Their vision swam, their fingers crackling with some sort of bright light, thunderous electricity, the shard of metal beginning to glow red, then white hot in their hand. A memory from long ago, when watching fireworks and being read holy scrolls by their Father in the courtyard, while everyone else enjoyed festivities, grapes, apples, wine.

"Jade, get down!" John yelled, Brother Strider backing away slowly in shock, staring at his sword. "Ancest'rs, descendants, twin moons above, i pray thee to bring thunder and light to this downpour, to split the sky till sunlight shines down on mine enemies." John murmured, slowly gaining in volume to a fever pitch, gripping the burning metal like it was lifeblood. Brother Strider looked at him with a mixture of awe and fear, his feet digging into the ground. John's arm reared back like they were preparing to throw a shot put at a contest, squeezing tight the bolt of broken sword until it hurt, it sizzled, and it evaporated the falling raindrops before they could even touch John's hand.

The mercury step is a devilish technique developed and utilized almost exclusively by the Dersite Brothers, allowing them to move and react at speeds almost completely imperceptible to the naked eye via the channeling of mana through one's limbs. While, most assuredly, any individual in touch with their magical energy and capable of putting in the effort would be able to perform the mercury step, the unique constitution of a Dersite court member is almost required to do so with any adequacy, lest you drain your whole body's reserves in four or five movements at most. Instead, through this process, the Dersite Brother burns only years of their lives, approximately one and a half days per mercury step, their signed contracts hanging in the deepest recesses of the Dersite fortresses twitching and thrumming like a heartbeat with every one performed. And sure, some Dersites who would like to live a hale and healthy life may be willing to temper this with some of their own energy, but only those not so single-mindedly focused on the Queen's duties that they would be willing to throw anything away, including their lives, for her sake.

The mercury step was fast, true, but it was not faster than lightning.

" _AMEN!_ "

There was another loud crack, and a second burst of light and noise, but with it, heat, dizzying and enveloping, flash-evaporating every raindrop it touched into steam in a loud burst of radiating energy. For almost half a second, anyone watching could see the firm, searing bolt of lightning loosed from John's hand, piercing through Brother Strider's body like a blade, exting out the other end, and then continuing forward to punch several holes in various buildings in its path before dispersing into molten metal somewhere about half a mile away. John's hand fizzed with cooling water washing over it as the rest of the rain continued its relentless onslaught with no more lightning-heat to keep it away. Brother Strider bent over, caught mid-mecury step, falling over onto his knees as he gripped his broken ribs and the new cauterized puncture wound he was wearing.

John bent down to match, buckling onto one knee, grinning like a maniac as water washed over their new glasses, without which they would have no chance of aiming such a perfect shot, especially not with whatever sort of devilry had resulted in their temporary blinding. Jade, having finally managed to reload her waterlogged hand-cannon, aimed it directly at Brother Strider's head. "If you try to move, I will not hesitate to put a cannonball through your skull." She threatened with the same level of casualness one would offer one a scone with, except with perhaps a bit more hyperventilation, chattering of the teeth, Jade's heartbeat singing in her ears like the spasmodic beating of a war drum.

There was a skidding to a halt of Sister Strider's feet planted firmly in the mud, easily holding off Dave's half-flamberge with a single hand while her fingers undulated like the tendrils of an octopus, some kind of somatic component not entirely dissimilar from the vocalizations necessary for John's holy magic. Her other hand worked to idly press Dave into the ground, years of experience and training trumping Dave's meagre, if well-developed skills, the way every little motion of her body went into digging Dave deeper into the mud. Her fingers splayed out, and then clenched up into a fist, and she vanished, immediately appearing in front of Jade with her sword bared and brows furrowed, eyes shut.

Jade fired on instinct, and there was a loud _clink_ as the bullet hit steel, chipping off a shard of the edge of Sister Strider's sword while the bullet itself vanished, splitting in two and kicking up two splatters of dirt closer to Karkat than anyone else. "Go." She snarled, and Brother Strider took the opportunity to leap out of harm's way, jabbing his broken sword into the edge of the inn's wooden walls and propelling himself onto the roof. He knelt down once more, grasping for his sides while Sister Strider gestured her blade towards Jade and John. "You two… I don't know who you are, but you've made powerful enemies this day."

John tried to stand up, so they could say something heroic and snarky and sure to get her to drop her defenses, but they were losing blood rapidly from four new holes in their body, soaking through their clothes, and their hand _burnt_ , it hurt so badly. It was all they could do to grip at their own hair, bow down, and begin chanting a song of healing. It was all they could do. Jade remained silent, with much more intent than John's bravado'd posturing.

Sister Strider whirled around on her heel, putting her angle between Jade and Dave to avoid being blindsided while pointing the tip of her sword towards Dave. "As for you, dearest Nephew… We'll be in touch." She threatened, sheathing her blade and vanishing onto the rooftops with Brother Strider. She slipped her arm underneath his, around his back, propping him up, and the two of them disappeared into the dark, rainy night.

"Gods almighty…" Dave mumbled, dashing over to John while Jade brought up their side, both of John's traveling companions reaching underneath them to help prop them up. A little bit of healing magic had sealed up the worst of the wounds, yes, but John was still woozy, light-headed, drifting from side to side as they stumbled through the mud. "You two are absolute fucking idiots. I just want you to know that."

"We're idiots who saved your life, so you can kiss my arse." John drunkenly slurred. "Jade, get me to the… fffffucking inn so I can pass out on a bed this time. Sir Strider, go make sure Karkat is okay, you shitting slime. You're going to tell us everything once I'm in bed and less blood loss-y, and you make sure he's not dead."

Dave wanted clearly, so badly, to say something in retort. Instead, showing restraint in his voice for perhaps the first time in his life, he sheathed his blade and vanished.

With Dave mostly out of view, and his attention away from John and Jade, Jade took a quick second to run her fingers through John's hair and then give him the lightest tap possible on the head. "Dave is right. You're an idiot, John."

"I'm an idiot who saved _your_ life too. And don't you evvvver forget it." John hissed through their teeth, laughing and grumbling quietly in equal measure as Jade dragged them through the mud towards the inn.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, formatting will come tomorrow.

John's bedroom in the inn was packed, relatively speaking - packed in the way that a bedroom wasn't really prepared for. A slightly gobsmacked Karkat Vantas sat on one of the barstools provided, with Jade on the edge of the bed, tending to John's _new_ wounds sustained in the course of being stabbed four times through the torso, among other fun injuries sustained. Dave leaned against a wall, trying to look as nonchalant and uncaring as he possibly could, even keeping his helmet on in the stuffy indoors, while Roxy slowly slipped inside with another basin full of water for John.

"You just really can't go a single damn scrap without blowing your arm off, can you?" Dave asked, piercing the thin-skinned bubble of tension in the room by immediately directing it at John instead of at himself. Perhaps part of him hoped this would start some long, meandering discussion, the way he and John somewhat frequently had long, meandering discussions, and by the time everyone was ready to go to bed, nobody would actually have to address the real elephant in the room that was perched so precariously on top of Dave's head, ready to crush him underfoot. "This is, what, the third fight I've been in with you at my side, and only the first that hasn't ended with you passed out and bruised like you've just been beaten silly in a bar brawl. No, instead you are fully awake but with a bunch of new holes in you like a leaky mug."

"Correction, Sir Strider, I'm only _half_ awake." John lazily answered, holding one hand in the air triumphantly, the skin bandaged and wrapped loosely and packed with medicinal poultice where it was its most burnt. As one could imagine, touching molten metal, even metal that was made molten through magical processes in one's body, tended to not exactly be great for the state of one's skin. It was a miracle that John seemed only a bit blistered and burnt at minimum, even further a miracle that they seemed too dazed to notice how much their body should be hurting. "There can be no victory without sacrifice, surely a skilled knight such as yourself would know these principles?"

Dave rolled his head in an exaggerated motion that suggested the rolling of eyes, watching as John, refusing to remove even the slightest scrap of clothing from their body, instead let Jade wrap them with bandages from the outside. The holes, mostly healed through judicious and quick application of holy magic, were completely sealed, the organs punctured mostly healed, and the blood no longer springing forth freely, but the wounds were still unsightly and incapable of being completely removed through holy magic alone. John's visible skin, what little of which they allowed to be shown to the visitors, Dave included, was crisscrossed with little lines, cuts, indentations that seemed inexplicable - when was there the opportunity for Brother or Sister Strider to make such shallow slices? - and that was where most of Jade's attention lay.

"Squire Egbert, I do not believe that when the scholars and artisans of war said these things they intended for you to allow yourself to be stabbed multiple times in order to gain some sort of baroque tactical advantage over the enemy. When we refer to the sacrifices made in victory, we are not referring to near-suicidal tactics - imagine if you couldn't heal! You'd be dead in the alley right now and, probably, so would everyone else." Dave launched out after several moments of tense, terse silence, gesturing broadly and quickly with his hands, to the slight shock of everyone in the room while he talked.

"Aw, you sound… concerned, even! That's uncharacteristic--" John teased.

Dave slammed a fist against the wall, making the room rattle, if for a moment. "Gods damnit, Egbert! Can you not take this seriously for even a scant moment? I was trying to _protect_ you two, which is why I told you to _not get involved_ , and now here you are on the brink of death again, can you not imagine how awful this sort of thing feels for me?" Dave roared, his concern mutating into stark anger. Karkat looked up from his feet for a moment, shoulder twitching like he was about to reach out towards Dave, and then, he decided against it, going back to staring at his feet. "How am I supposed to lead Squire Egbert to greatness when they keep throwing themselves against brick walls every time we bump into the lightest resistance on our way there? It's unsustainable."

"Here's the better question - how are you supposed to lead us to greatness when you have royal assassins trying to kill you?" John asked, grinning even wider for a moment, before their face snapped into stony determination. "Don't be such a hypocrite, Sir Strider. It's unbecoming of a knight of your stature."

Jade pulled away from John, wiping sweat off her brow and throwing her feet over the side of the bed, leaning back to let her soaked hair rest against a small towel, to try and get some of the moisture out of it. "John, you are an idiot. I don't even know how you got most of these cuts but I'm only going to patch up so many for you before I start charging."

"I'm with Miss Har--" Dave began, before Jade's head snapped onto Dave with an angry, almost dog-like bark.

"And _you_! Maybe you could give us some forewarning before we decide that coming with you would put us in mortal danger? You sure seemed to know who those people were on sight, and they sure seemed to know who you are, so I can only assume through the circumstantial evidence available that there's some sort of connection that you aren't telling us about. I am a little upset about this, so I would appreciate some gods-damned clarification, if-you-would-be-so-kind-as-to-do-so- _Sir_." She yelled, even louder than Dave yelled at John, making Roxy wince.

"Volume, please?" They asked, small and meek and quiet. "I get that we're all mad - nobody's more mad at my stupid cousin than I am, but if we're trying to be discreet we should probably not be yelling loud enough that all the people in the rooms next door can hear us. I think. I think that sounds… Reasonable." Roxy suggested, looking around nervously for signs of approval from the wider group.

"Yeah, yeah, let's shut up so we don't get Lord Halley's men called down from the mountainsides to execute us for impertinence or risking war or whatever it is he'd feel like putting a bounty on our heads for." Karkat growled, his voice low enough to avoid, hopefully, drawing the ire of any onlookers in the rooms to the left and right. "Maybe you three are fine with losing your heads, but I think I speak for both of us, Roxy and I, when I say we've been spending a damn long time making life work in this little quiet town, away from all the stupid politicking and masturbatory bull manure of the courts, and here you are, dragging it right back to us."

He brandished a sickle towards Dave, and Roxy didn't think he was wrong enough to intercede, to suggest that anything Karkat said was inaccurate. "I don't care what kind of life of devil-may-care bullshit you're up to in your free time, but the second it almost gets me killed I fully expect you to let me in on as many of the gods-damned juicy details as are necessary to prevent me from _almost getting killed again_ , you cantankerous lummox. You're going to give me all the academic details I need to prevent anything like this from getting in my fucking way again, the who, what, when, where, why, and how, you under-fucking-stand me?"

Dave slumped just a little bit against the wall, unable to resist the quiet pain of legitimate anger from a person he had more than a bit of rapport with. His shoulders lowered with a release of tension, his muscles deadend, and he sighed quietly, trying and failing to pull his visor lower like it could go any lower, and prevent him from being looked at. There was no stopping it, though - everyone was looking at him. Everyone was looking directly at him, and they were expecting the truth, a pained truth that would make them all more vulnerable. "I can't. I can't tell you that."

"Fuck you, you can't, I'll rip off your genitals and mulch them and feed them to my horse. Why can't you?" Karkat hissed between his teeth, flicking his sickle left and right in Dave's general direction with each enunciated word, his fingers white knuckled against the handle, blood rushing through his pointed ears and casting his face a deep, angry red.

"Because nobody's supposed to know they exist, and they'll kill you for knowing. That's why they're trying to kill me." Dave answered, finally looking up from the spot on the floor in the center of the room he was busy staring and moping towards, although not looking directly at anyone in particular.

"The Brothers are still alive, huh." Karkat murmured, pulling his sickle back into his lap, face furrowed into an expression of inexhaustible rage and exhaustion. "You know, I didn't believe you the first time. Maybe I should've."

"No, you shouldn't have. And you shouldn't believe me now. I was supposed to be one of the last one - not _the_ last, but there were only a couple kids younger than me, stuck in there with me now. The fact… the fact that you even knew what the Brothers _were_ is bad." Dave said, quietly, turning his head a hair towards Karkat, as if to indicate who he was talking to. "You're not supposed to."

"Well, tough shit, I guess they'll have to cry about it." Karkat shrugged, snapping his sickle to the strap on his back so he didn't have to deal with gesturing it about in one hand to make his point.

"No, realistically, they're just going to keep coming until you die." Dave said solemnly, going back to staring at a point on the ground in the center of the room.

"Damn, that sucks." John shrugged, leaning back onto their pillow. "I guess I'll have to keep kicking their ass."

"No matter how good you think you are, Squire Egbert, I don't think you're prepared to take on a Brother man-to-man." Dave responded dryly.

"Or woman-to-man!" John replied glibly, smirking.

Dave rubbed his chin in thought for a moment. "Also true, I don't think you would last more than a minute against Sister Strider. The only reason we made it out alive is because Jade managed to injure Brother Strider with the element of surprise on her side - I'm doubtful they'll let us keep the element of surprise at any point beyond this one. They'll recuperate, heal Brother Strider up, and then come back for us until we're all dead, for the crime of remembering them."

"Wait, hold on a moment." Jade cut in, making chopping motions in the air with one of her hands, almost wooshing through them while she moved about hyperactively as much as she could while sitting down. "No, I don't buy that. I don't buy that one bit."

"You don't… _buy_ it? I'm afraid it's just demonstrably true, Miss Harley. There's nothing for you not to buy. The sale has already been made. This has been how the Brothers have operated for centuries. I would know, I was in training to become one of them, and secrecy is part of our code." Dave elaborated, in a feeble attempt to shut down Jade's line of thought. Not because he feared what she was about to say, but because he couldn't comprehend an alternative. Part of the Brother's Code was to ensure none knew about the organization, and sure, some people may have learned of them in the years since the last peace treaty, as information trickles outwards inevitably and always, but nobody should be allowed to dig too deep. The fact that they were still around, enforcing this, seemed to prove that enough, that the old rules were being enforced even if by new enforcers. What other explanation could there be? "What transaction is there to be refused?"

"Use your _brain_ , Sir Strider, as atrophied as it may be. They're _assassins_. I've barely even heard of them, presumably because they take secrecy seriously. Did the Brothers have a history of leaving behind victims or making examples of people?" Jade asked, tapping her forehead idly with her index finger, like the repetitive touching would help her think faster, more clearly, more effectively. She tapped harder and faster as her brain took in information, thoughts connecting to other thoughts like chain link, being woven together into a thick armoring of ideas.

"Not to anyone except the loved ones, no. If an example was needed to be made, decapitations were requested. Otherwise, the various covert methods of pain and cruelty were preferred - poisoning, envenomed weapons, curses and hexes. Swordplay was a means to an end, in order to defeat an opponent that could fight back. There was never any training about dragging someone to a crucifix or pinning their head to a stake - just death, and decapitation, to let important individuals know that they weren't safe even in their homes." Dave answered, letting himself slide down the wall a little bit. "I don't see why this is relevant, though."

"Think, you featherhead! Is _anyone_ in this village even _remotely_ important?" Jade pointed out. "No offense, Roxy, Karkat."

"None taken." Roxy chuckled nervously, waving the comment off.

"I'm sure the Siblings, or whatever, are more than capable of hunting someone down without having to very publicly intimidate the populace. They've already been close enough on your trail to find that you were here, all it would take is maybe another day of searching, or even just going to the inn and waiting for you to wake up, and then they trail you and slit your throat while you sleep. Why did they try to make a big public show about it?" Jade asked to an uncomfortable room, watching as they digested the implications of what she was saying.

"What exactly are you implying?" Dave asked, raising an eyebrow that nobody could see underneath his visor. John stared upwards at the ceiling, rubbing a scabbed over cut on their cheek, while Roxy stayed close to the door and Karkat turned his head to look at Jade.

Jade looked down at her feet in frustration, tugging on her damp hair with one hand and then gently knocking her head against the wall. "That's just it, I don't _know_ what I'm implying, but none of this sounds like "assassin" to me. It's too dramatic. Way too public. If they want to kill you they should've just killed you. This whole interrogating Karkat, leaving room for witnesses, gods, I'm sure half the damned village saw them, that's the _opposite_ of stealthy. Why?"

Dave sighed dramatically, pulling himself off the wall and shrugging his shoulders with a loud, unamused "Iunno."

"Yeah, I figured not." Jade shot back, hopping up from John's bed, signalling the end of the conversation - it was clear to her that nothing more productive would be get done here today. "Innkeep, how much for a room?"

"Oh, don't - don't worry about it. As much as Dave is a persnickety hardass, you saved his life, and that means a lot to me. There's a free room right next door, I'll go get that one set up for you." Roxy answered, nodding vigorously at nothing at all and then vanishing out the door to do just that, eager to no longer be involved in an uncomfortable conversation about their cousin almost dying.

"Persnickety hardass my balls…" Dave mumbled under his breath, wandering his way over to the door, waiting for Jade to leave and then standing by it. He looked at Karkat with a strange sort of expectation until Karkat, too, got up and walked out the door, sighing frustratedly, before Dave shut it behind him. "How are you holding up?"

John's loose, wishy-washy expression curled up into a smile as they looked from the ceiling over to Dave. "Man, you really are worried about me, aren't you?"


	19. Chapter 19

"You misunderstand me, James - this, all of this, no --" Kankri spoke, mealy-mouthed but gentle, stumbling over his words. The great Orator of Prospit in the flesh, without a plan or a script, was far less the mighty speaker he appeared to be. Almost bumbling, even, in a way that beggared belief, the way he stumbled over words and phrases, his silver tongue molten into uselessness when not on a lectern, talking to a crowd. No, when it came to talking to people as an individual person, and not as Kankri Vantas, Great Orator, the man was as hopeless as ever. His sentences ran into each other like a herd of impatient horses trying to pull a cart in every other direction, occasionally snapping the cart in two, and his hands shook as he attempted to demonstrate the spells he was attempting to teach his disciple.

James Egbert was unconvinced.

In the courtyard gardens of the ancestral castle of Prospit, James Egbert, Kankri Vantas, and two small children occupied the space, a lush little square of grass surrounded on all sides by stone walkways, with a large apple tree looming overhead. One of them shook slightly, as if perturbed by the slight breeze whistling between the leaves, and fell down into James's awaiting hand, quickly met by dangerous teeth biting through crisp flesh. With his mouth gloriously full, he responded; "Surely, if I am misunderstanding, then it is your duty as the teacher to explain in a clearer fashion. Apple?"

"Sure." Kankri responded, reaching out with both hands to catch the bitten-through, underhand-thrown apple in his palms, quickly ripping through it with his teeth. With his ancestry the tangled web it was, Kankri was gifted with a maw of startlingly sharp teeth that he put to good use devouring all manner of vegetation and little else, although, if you caught him on a good day, you'd easily be able to cajole him to admit his desire to no longer subside on food at all. The holiest existence would harm neither plants nor animals, only subsisting on pure aether and mana alone. Alas, Kankri was only mortal, and that meant he required food like the rest of them. With the apple thoroughly torn to shreds, leaving small stains of juice on his fingers, he flicked the core back to James, who caught it one handed. With a slight smile, James bent over to the roots of the apple tree, giving it a quiet, appreciative pat, and dug a small hole that he then proceeded to bury the apple in.

"Waste not, want not. Circle of life continues." He quipped, flipping back onto his butt so that he could sit in the grass a good couple of feet away from his mentor.

"Great segueway! Watch your feet, little one--" Kankri began, only to be interrupted by a toddling child stumbling forward like a penguin, waddling angrily on two stumpy legs with hands full of dirt, attempting to fling them towards the girl he was chasing. "Karkat! What did we say about putting dirt in Jane's hair?"

"She's the one who wanted to make mud pies! I'm putting it in her pockets, not her hair!" The small child whined, throwing his feet about left and right in an amusing display of childish anger.

"Well, none of that either, little one. You put that dirt back where it came from, or so help me Skaia…" Kankri replied, causing Karkat to go still and pale for a moment as he processed the unspoken words. Then, with a shrill little yelp, the boy ran off to re-bury the dirt he had excavated with his tiny little fingers. "Children these days, huh? Just can't stop going out and making trouble for themselves."

"Oh, shove off it, you know we were far worse when we were teenagers. Right now they're barely any trouble at all." James replied, dismissively waving a hand in front of his face.

"Not having any issues with Miss Crocker's child?" Kankri asked, watching as Jane was now the one chasing Karkat with hands full of dirt, doubtlessly to attempt to feed some of it to him.

"No, she fits in comfortably and quietly and likes to help in the kitchen. She'll make an excellent baker one day, I wager." James replied, looking over his shoulder just enough to keep her in his peripheral vision. "Not much of a troublemaker. A bit of a teacher's pet, really. Oy! Jane!"

Jane immediately came to a dead halt, tossing the dirt out of her hands and tucking them behind her back, inevitably getting her little dress a teensy bit dirt-stained. That being said, it wasn't like she wasn't already dirt-stained from tumbling around with little Karkat, her knees bearing the telltale signs of grass smudges, stained green with ground chlorophyll. "Yes, papa?"

"Remember! No feeding people dirt!" James chastised as weakly as humanly possible, wagging a minuscule finger-wag in her direction.

"Yes, papa!" Jane repeated, waiting until James turned around before bending down and grabbing more dirt, her head snapping onto Karkat like a crossbowman's aim, and her feet beginning to carry her once more into action.

"You do know she's probably just going to stuff it into his pockets then, yeah?" Kankri said after watching her go for a little bit, her longer legs easily carrying her into the range of Karkat, who nimbly dodged her attempts to smear dirt on him in the way that only a halfling child could.

"Oh, we could all use a little dirt in our pockets now and again, wouldn't you say?" James replied with a grin and a wink.

Kankri narrowed his eyes. "I'm not answering that."

James's chest buckled up and down in raucous laughter. "Good, probably for the better for someone of your position."

"Someone of _my_ position, says the paladin - where's _your_ sense of godliness?" Kankri joked, picking up a small pebble from the grass, aiming it on his thumb, and screwing his tongue up out of his mouth. "Amen." He said, flicking it with his other index finger, where the stone rapidly accelerated in the air and struck James in the forehead with an outsized force, throwing him backward into the grass. "Right, where were we?"

Rubbing his forehead with a loud groan, James slowly pulled himself up, staring at Kankri with a look of unbridled mock-hatred. He muttered a little prayer, sealing up the burst blood vessels in his forehead that would likely have turned into a somewhat nasty bruise, and then polished it off with an "Amen.", same as Kankri. "We were discussing, last I checked, before interrupted by an apple and children and a pebble to the forehead, we were talking about the subtle arts of spellcraft that you believed I lacked."

"Well, it's not quite belief if it's demonstrated so adequately in front of me, now is it?" Kankri spoke aloud, with that same charming, winning smile and cherubic demeanour that had won over crowds of hundreds and annoyed James to no end. Not the least of which being that both James and Kankri knew equally well that the smile would do little-to-nothing against someone like James, and yet Kankri did it anyway, his own subtle little aggression, to pile on the wounding to James's pride and ego. "You have no understanding of the craft, you merely wield it in the way that a particularly angry ogre may wield a cart as a club, with no knowledge as to its true purpose or use. Even if that ogre was small enough to fit in the cart, and smart enough to hitch an oxen or a chimera to it, I'd be more likely to think it did so out of serendipity than knowledge of the cart's uses. An observation here or there - this rolls when I push it, there's space to attach an animal."

"You sure do talk a lot." James replied, grabbing the pebble that had bounced nearly perfectly vertically on his forehead as it fell back down to earth into his hands. "So, you're just calling me a bad mage, is that it?"

Kankri tut-tutted quietly, shaking his head. "You are the ogre smashing objects with a cart, occasionally getting glimpses of its true purpose through serendipity. I'm sure you'd be a perfectly adequate mage if you put your mind to it, but we're not talking about traditional magecraft here. Different vehicle entirely." Kankri explained, gesticulating one hand a bit more wildly than the other as he talked.

"This analogy is getting a bit torturous, is there any possibility you can speak like us normal mortals back on terra firma?" James snarked, rolling the rounded-off pebble in his fingers, sizing it up, wondering just what spell in his arsenal could be used to propel it back towards Kankri and reclaim the Prankster's Gambit.

"The fact that you need to speak at all limits you, Father Egbert. The truest practitioners of the craft require nothing but a solemn and earnest prayer in the heart, and an "Amen"". Kankri elaborated, tossing a small rock up and down in his hands as he did so.

"And the blood, sweat, and mana." James recited from memory, semi-sarcastically.

"And, indeed, the blood, sweat, and mana. Good on you for remembering!" Kankri congratulated him.

"It's not like you'd possibly let me forget it." James snarked back, to which Kankri nodded, smiling with his sharp teeth all lined up against each other.

"No, no I would not. Any two-bit priest or cleric or rector would be able to channel all their life force into a single spell that blows the arms off of them and strikes down their enemies in a single blow, but only the best of the best can do so without warning the enemy in advance of what they have in mind." Kankri recited as if from memory -- because he had, in fact, memorized his elaboration days ago when preparing for today's lesson. "It is my finest technique, mastered by few and desired by many, and the thing that will set you apart from the masses. The silent prayer."

"Sounds boring." James glibly replied. Where's the fun in a fight if I can just explode all my enemies into bloody kibble before they even know what's hit them? I say that sounds like an awfully boring sort of life to live. No hidden drive or verve to fight, just read inside the scroll to Smite." James continued, tasting the words quietly on his tongue as he spoke. "Oh, lovely me, that one rhymed. No hidden drive or verve to fight, just read inside the scroll to Smite. I'll work on it."

"Don't quit your day job, Father Egbert. And catch!" Kankri shouted, flinging a stone up in the air. Immediately, James's well-trained combat instincts began to twitch into play, his pupils dilating slightly and then constricting as he looked upwards into the bright blue sky, his muscle memory causing his tongue to begin chanting before he could even consider the idea of merely thinking his prayers. It took no time at all for a deftly, quickly-speed-read smite to load itself in the pebble, rendering it golden, shimmering, shining. A quick snap of the wrist, and James's throw sent the pebble into a skyward arc, causing Kankri's thrown rock to be shattered into small fragments on the way there, discharging most of the holy energies built up inside of the pebble before it disappeared into the horizon. Later in the day, James would find out that the pebble ended up, by sheer chance, hitting the Emperor on the head, and would have to suppress his laughter. "I see. That's a shame."

"Oh, piss off, Vantas." James grumbled, uncontrolled anger quickly being restrained even as it filtered through his voice, bubbling through like the flavor of tea into boiling, scalding water. Quickly, the boil settled. "It's the automatic response. My tongue works before I am to consider what it is that it's saying."

"And another thing!" Kankri shouted over James. "You require time to speak and understand what spell you are casting. Not only do I have the element of surprise if I were to grant you a shining spear, or a smite, or a burst of light, but I also have the element of speed. You have to react with your mouth. I am under no such restrictions." He continued, reaching down to pick up another rock, only stopping at the sudden sensation of being poked on the head by a flung pebble. No spell behind it, of course, otherwise his ward would've stopped it in its tracks. Just a pebble. "That habit of yours is one we'll have to train you out of."

"Oh, I'd love to train-- Never mind." James snapped back, folding his hands behind his back before he could finish his sentence. Kankri raised a curious eyebrow, but made nothing more of it, pulling a long cloth ribbon out of his pocket and flicking it towards James. Almost immediately, the ribbon turned ethereal and grasping with an "Amen.", transmuting itself into a long extension of Kankri's hand, wrapping around James's throat and pulling him within slapping distance. Slapping was, of course, not something Kankri enjoyed doing, so instead, he just tied the ribbon around James's face while he was too stunned to do anything about it. James stared at Kankri, brow furrowed, making plenty of noise and fury behind the cloth removing his ability to speak, but unable to do much about it.

Kankri tapped the knot he had tied at the back of James's head with another silent "Amen.", the familiar chiming sound of prayer overuse ringing from Kankri's skin on the back of his hands. Blood began to leak into Kankri's layers and layers of bandages - not a huge amount of blood, of course not, but blood nonetheless, slowly and quietly working its way through the outer layer. Kankri's hands were seen by very few, and James was not among that list; he only knew of legends, of the scarring of Kankri Vantas, how his hands had become hardened and pale over the years as he refined his prayers to a roaring, powerful peak, taking in all the pain and suffering that sort of thing required. "There. Now you can either get that off of you by smiting it with your breath and no words, or, I suppose you aren't eating dinner tonight." Kankri suggested, grinning. His face melted back into thoughtfulness quickly enough. "Or any night, really, unless I decide to let you out."

James wasted no time swinging twice at Kankri, once with one arm, once with the other, but the other man nimbly and easily dodged beneath James. Having a foot of height difference between the two had a tendency to do that. James grumbled something that sounded quite a lot like "Fuck your mother.", but it was impossible to tell, because his mouth was muffled with enchanted cloth.

"Temper, temper. Let's get to work, shall we, Father Egbert?"


	20. Chapter 20

Dave stared at a wooden table, mouse-quiet, watching as a bowl of stew went untouched, casting warm steam into the air. The chairs were soft and cushioned, far softer than the stone he had been sleeping on earlier, and his little jail cell was much more accommodating than the streets of Derse. A loaf of bread - an entire loaf, all for himself! - sat on a plate, with a royal-looking set of silverware placed neatly and politely to the side.

The tall man who had rescued him, who called himself "Brother Strider", watched quietly, leaning against the sole bookshelf in the room with his arms folded in front of his chest. His shoulders were broad, arms lanky, and a long, curved sword set comfortably in its scabbard rested along his hip, body draped in long, black robes that were tied tight around his limbs and torso with thin orange and purple ribbons. Ceremonial clothing, he had said, he wouldn't be wearing anything nearly as silly as this if it was time to work on an actual hunt.

But now, there wasn't talking. Just Dave staring at food and Brother Strider staring at Dave. "Well?" He asked, adjusting the ribbon tied around his forehead, running his hands back through his hair. One thing Dave noticed immediately when he met the man was how immaculate his nails were; compared to Dave's overgrown, dirt-filled nails, Brother Strider's were polished, clean, short, blunt. Incapable of scratching. Presumably because scratching and clawing wasn't necessary for his way of life, but still, it struck Dave in a way that he couldn't articulate, that Brother Strider could be afforded even these small luxuries.

If Dave accepted the offer, could he have them as well?

"I'm thinking." Dave, young, precocious, no more than eight or nine, piped up, a shrimp compared to this dangerous beanpole man, the gulf in height absolutely deafening - and not helped by the fact that he was sitting down. And sure, Dave would sprout like a plant as he aged, developing musculature and height until he could one day stand comparable to Brother Strider, but right now, he was no more than eight or nine years old (his birthday unknown) and he was sitting in front of a bowl of stew.

"You can eat while you think, too. It's good food. I didn't make it, but I do eat it every day." Brother Strider responded. His voice was smooth and rough at the same time, low and princely, like the sound of two polished stones rubbing against each other, catching all the tiny, microscopic ridges inside of each other to produce a vibrating clangor. "Plus, you can still taste it. Appreciate that while you can."

"Are you meaning to tell me that you can't taste things anymore? Is that another part of yourself they get rid of during training?" Dave asked, raising an eyebrow at Brother Strider. Dave was cleaned up a little bit, yes, but compared to Brother Strider in his ceremonial robes, Dave was still nothing more than a little urchin from the street. Rags only replaced with nicer, patched-up rags, giving him the affordance of two layers to work with. Long pants that covered his ankles. Small shoes fitting his equally small feet, socks for the first time in his life that he could remember.

"No, I just smoke a lot. It ruins your sense of taste, I can't recommend it." Brother Strider responded, chuckling low and slow under his breath. "You start having to import exotic capsicum from across the ocean and oversalting your food just to feel something again."

Dave stuck a tongue out. "Bleh. That sounds awful." He mumbled over his still-out tongue before retracting it back into his mouth like a snail retreating into its bony, tooth-covered shell. "I'll avoid that. I'm sure when I eat actual good food I'll appreciate the ability to taste it in a way you haven't."

"I'm sure you will, little one. Now eat up. It's not a binding contract, you can swallow some potatoes without agreeing to anything." Brother Strider responded, adjusting the ribbon on his forehead again. He reached around behind his head so he could tie it slightly tighter, pulling the knot against the back of his head with a little grunt.

Dave eyed the stew warily, picking up a spoon with an uncomfortable amount of unfamiliarity. "I don't know how to hold this." He said.

Brother Strider sighed quietly, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose between two fingers. "It's a spoon. You have never used a spoon before, little one?"

"No." Dave replied.

Brother Strider took a minute or so to examine his own hands, folding his fingers up against one another in an attempt to articulate how exactly one used a spoon. To him, it seemed strangely irrational, the idea that one had never used a utensil before. Sure, when Brother Strider was a newborn, tabula rasa, there was no knowledge of such a thing, but it was so finely ingrained in his muscle memory that the idea of not knowing how to use one seemed as preposterous as not understanding how to use a sword, or not understanding how to perform the mercury step. Preposterous.

"Okay, look at your pointer finger." Brother Strider instructed, holding his hand up to his face to demonstrate. Dave mirrored closely behind, after a moment of observation to make sure he was using the same hand. "The first knuckle, right below the nail - observe it. Then, place your thumb perpendicular to it, like you're pinching cloth." He continued, and Dave followed, making silent pinching motions, following eagerly. "Okay, now do that to the handle of the spoon, and then close your other fingers around it so you're clutching it inside your palm."

Dave reached down, picking up the spoon as indicated. It was fairly simple once he understood what exactly he was holding. "And then I think I put it into the stew, and the roundness will capture the stew?"

"That is an incredibly strange way of phrasing it, but yes, that is correct. You learn fast, little one." Brother Strider responded, nodding his head at Dave.

Dave reached with the spoon into the stew, which was now no longer piping hot and was downgraded to just a normal amount of hotness. Up came the thick liquid, along with some chunks of potato and meat, and they were brought to Dave's lips. His mouth opened up, and food was placed inside, his tongue pulling it off the utensil before his teeth began the typical process of chewing things. That much wasn't foreign to him, he may not have used utensils but he sure had eaten. He reached over with his other hand somewhat awkwardly to grab the bread, crossing over his own arm in the process, before realizing that it would probably be easier to just grab its plate and move it over to the other side. His fingers ripped at it, pulling off crust and interior, dropping his spoon in the stew to let it rest on the rim of his bowl while he spent a good two minutes completely disassembling the bread.

Ripping up the pillowy interior crumb, he tossed it into the stew, stirring it around silently outside of the occasional clinking of the spoon against the bowl. Then, he continued eating, slowly and thoughtfully shoveling food down his hungry throat. It wasn't the first thing he had been fed by the court's whims, there were sweet grapes and some sort of confectionary, but it was the first savory meal that he felt like consisted of actual satisfying material. Warm, thick broth, chunks of potato and bread and a meat he couldn't identify. Comforting flavors. Some weird looking little flakes of green stuff. It was certainly food, and when he was finished with the bowl of it, he took his sweet time consuming the remains of his bread, crust piece by crust piece, using them to scrape all the little droplets of the stuff left. All told, it took him about 20 minutes to finish eating, and he pushed the bowl away from him when he was done, dumping all his utensils inside.

"Can I go home now?" Dave asked.

Brother Strider reached up and scratched his head. "You mean back under the bridge where we found you? Sure, you can, but… why?"

"I think if you need me your court guys can find me, right?" Dave responded, chuckling, scooting the chair out from underneath the table. "I'm full and tired. I appreciate the food."

"No sense of patriotism to motivate you to make a living for your Empress?" Brother Strider asked, raising an eyebrow. His eyes were strikingly amber, almost golden orange, glinting in the yellow candlelight of the room. Shadows stretched uncomfortably against the walls like men in torture devices. "Desire for resources? A bed? A life?"

Dave rubbed his chin in quiet, childish contemplation. "I live good under the bridge. It's nice and it smells like home, and the people give me coin when I ask. Can you give me that?"

"You live well. Not good, well." Brother Strider responded, pulling himself off from the bookshelf and walking towards the bed, turning around and collapsing down onto it, listening to it creak underneath his rear. He grabbed a pillow, pulled it into his lap, and proceeded to gently fluff and pull and bend it, as if to demonstrate its softness. "And you'll live even better here, under my tutelage. Actual payment. Actual food beyond scraps. The ear of the Empress. I won't even mention the contract with the Noble Circle, since I feel like that would go over your little head. Think about this, Dave. You don't have to go back."

"But it's all I have. Why would I leave?" Dave answered. It was apparently profound enough, in some infantile way, to stun Brother Strider for a moment, who stared at Dave with his mouth hanging limply open. At least, before he recovered himself and proceeded to clamp his jaw back shut.

"How about this, then; I know of the architects and bricklayers in the city. I'll get them to remove a brick for you, and you can keep it by your bedside and smell home as you sleep. In _addition_ to everything else." Brother Strider cajoled, at a bit of his wits end by an obstinate child.

Dave scratched his head a bit while he considered the offer. "Sure. I'm not sure what use a mewling little homeless orphan boy is to you fellows in the court, but clearly you need me for whatever reason, so I will grace you with my wit and charm. Surrender to me all your women." Dave answered, stepping forward to Brother Strider with all the confidence and bravado of a skilled warrior 20 years his own senior, reaching a hand out to Brother Strider. The trained assassin bent down into a squat, kneeling closer to eye-level with Dave (unable to kneel further into it without contorting his limbs), and reached out to shake the urchin's hand. "It's a deal."

* * *

It was comfortable, living in the court of Derse, in the dungeons, where no light reached. Brother Strider was not a kind teacher, but he was a kind man, tending to all of Dave's needs whenever they required filling. Over the course of the year, the boy began growing, now with food to fuel his oncoming pubescence, and began learning, entirely on his own, independently devouring the bookshelf he was offered. Every book, from tales of fanciful creatures to chivalrous knights getting into shenanigans, to nonfictional accounts of local politics and thick textbooks of science and math, was consumed with the same hungry fervor. At first, just pictures, until three months were spent with Brother Strider teaching him how to actually read the interesting schematics and diagrams he was given access to.

Another year passed. Dave, now ten, eleven maybe, had begun to sprout like a tree. The days were full of food and coin and training, brutal training where he was dashed against the stone walls and sand floors of the imperial colosseum. The wooden sword he was given to train with was ineffective against Brother Strider's scabbard, his little strength incapable of comparing to Brother Strider's developed, adult muscles. Dave fought, and fought his little heart out, and every day his reflexes were faster than the day before, every day his own muscles a little stronger.

When he started actually being able to press back on Brother Strider's offensive, his guardian began to introduce new tricks. Movement beyond speeds that Dave's eyes could trace. Wordless threats to burn Dave's sword with phantom fire. Thick roots would bind his feet to the sand, tying him down while he was struck, never anywhere vital but often and repeatedly.

It was important for developing pain tolerance. Dave stopped flinching after the fourth week of his regular training. It was very important, to no longer flinch at pain, because that meant he could follow through, push his muscles to the limits, ignore screaming soreness and ignore the impossibility of fighting back against a fully trained adult man. Brother Strider drew his sword, his real sword, as a test.

Dave did not blink, even as his wooden training sword was snapped in half. It meant he was ready.

Dave Strider was possibly thirteen at this point. The air in the dungeons beneath the capital of Derse was crisp and cold, and his face was bleeding from the gash that had been carved into it not 15 minutes ago, screaming with pain that he ignored. Brother Strider followed closely behind, in combat gear, not ceremonial robes, his sword wiped clean of blood and now being oiled with a small cloth rag.

The air only got colder the further they descended, into dungeons past dungeons, places where sunlight was only a faint memory, lit by ill yellow torches stuck in the walls. There were no humans here, at least, not for extended periods of time, and Dave knew exactly who inhabited these cages instead. "Don't look." Brother Strider instructed, and Dave did not look, his gaze not even flickering into the empty blacknesses to his left and right, continuing down the hall. "You will be making the same contract I have, as have all Striders before me. Deep Oglogoth will be accepting your contract."

"Yes, Brother." Dave intoned, almost silently. They were not walking to the last cage in the dungeon, nor did Dave know exactly where they were walking to, only that there was a cage, and that Brother Strider tapped his scabbard against the ground twice, and Dave stopped.

"Left." Brother Strider said, and Dave turned to the left, walking forward to the prison bars. Two narrow tentacles, each one covered in a veritable tide of plant-like thorns, coiled around the cage's bars, and as Dave gazed into the light-swallowing chamber, a single eye made itself manifest from the void, pressing gently between the bars, rusted metal pushing into vertical eyelids. The devil's eye, with its teardrop-shaped pupil, blinked sideways at Dave, and then the devil's mouth became visible, all molars, pushed into the bars with a loud and sudden clang. Dave did not flinch.

"Greetings, Deep Oglogoth, Lord of Thorns. I come here today presenting an offering - my apprentice, the new Brother Strider, wishes to tell you something." Brother Strider said, putting a soft, comforting hand on Dave's shoulder. Dave stepped forward, pulling his shoulder away from Brother Strider until he was face to face with Oglogoth.

"Do tell. I've been _craving_ a good tale." Oglogoth responded, grin widening beyond the confines of normal cheeks. If there was any bodily substance in the inky void of the dungeon chamber, there wasn't any of it that Dave could see, Oglogoth's body parts shifting and moving in anatomically impossible ways, no cheeks or chin restraining the motion of Oglogoth's mouth.

"Tale this." Dave replied, and immediately headbutted Oglogoth's eye with as much force as he could muster. His eye was surprisingly firm, not at all like the feeling Dave experienced when he shut his eyelids and prodded softly with his finger. Oglogoth felt more like a stone, and the experience of headbutting him was distinctly unpleasant, Dave's blood splattering freely against Oglogoth's pupil.

The devil stared back at Dave, blinking in shock. Its face remained in a quiet, rictus grin, before getting even wider, an almost complete semicircular arc surrounding its eye. As it spoke, its mouth refused to open. "Brother Strider, control your apprentice."

Brother Strider shook his head. "If this lout has a death wish then I trust you to enact the appropriate punishment, Lord Oglogoth."

And then, Oglogoth laughed. Its mouth hung limply open in all directions and it laughed and laughed, cackling uproariously, its laughter echoing out into the halls and making the stone foundations of the castle shake and buzz with resonation. Then, after what seemed like forever, it stopped laughing, training its pupil on Dave's blood-smeared face. "You. You will be the thirteenth Brother Strider to sign my contract. You are the first Brother Strider to strike me. I appreciate this."

"Do you? Damn it all. I was hoping you'd strangle me." Dave replied nonchalantly, being completely opaque as to whether or not he was sincere or merely in jest.

Oglogoth's third tendril gently slid beneath his mouth, presenting a thick, tattered parchment to Dave. "All I ask is that you agree to sign away your tender, aged years of your life, and grant me a taste of your blood, and my magic is yours." Oglogoth offered, slowly bringing the contract up to Dave's face.

Dave didn't bother to read it. His blunt nails reached up and scraped dry blood off chin, dirtying the undersides, before he scraped it against Oglogoth's contract, trying at every turn to bother the titanic eyeball, roughly the size of his entire body. Oglogoth chuckled and pulled the contract back into the darkness, buzzing quietly with a loud, silent buzz that rang across every acre of Dave's skin in a most unsettling way. "I'm afraid I like this one much more than I like you, Brother Strider. And I like him far, far more than your sire. I almost like him as much as your grandsire. I tell you what, I do, David E. Lalonde!"

For a moment, Dave's mind reeled. Who was David Lalonde? Was that his name before… all this? But then, he shoved it out of his mind. There was danger, and that meant all thought must be towards annihilation. He could investigate his familiar line later. "And what do you tell, Oglogoth, Lord of Deep Piss in which many Drown Within?"

Oglogth hummed quietly. "Draw on my power, David Lalonde. Make life… entertaining."


	21. Chapter 21

There was nothing particularly spectacular about the next handful of weeks to come. After those explosive couple of days and nights, the trio of adventurers continued their daily routines, day after day, while waiting for John to recuperate. Roxy allowed them discounted room and board, helpfully, which made upkeep easy on their relatively light coinpurses. Even with all their skill in the divine, holy arts, sealing up four puncture wounds that went directly through one's body was only a temporary reprieve for John, a way to prevent immediate death in the midst of combat. The true hard work, then, was for John to be able to rest and recover without doing something rash, and silly, and impulsive, in the way that John Egbert frequently liked to do, that would re-open their old wounds and start the process all over again.

To someone like John, this was a trial tantamount to torture. A true arduous challenge of the soul, a test - can John withstand being mostly bedridden for a month without going absolutely insane?

Almost certainly not.

John woke up every day at the crack of dawn, their lovely restful sleep full of dreams of ruined worlds and dark knights interrupted by the rustling of the populace, one person the room over waking up someone else with their footsteps on creaking wood, and that person waking up another, until they all slowly trickled downstairs for food and on occasion a morning ale or two. Then, it was back to wistless sleep once the commotion had died down and visitors to the inn filtered out into their daily duties. At one point, John had tried to use this opportunity to slip out of a window onto a balcony, and from there, into the alleyway where they could get away from the stifling sensation of being cushioned all day. The following exchange looked something like this;

"John?" Roxy asked, arms folded over their chest, looking upwards at the half-open casement with an arm and a leg sticking through. "John, what are you doing?"

"Um." John stammered, cracking their head through the window to look back at Roxy with all the shame possible in their body, knowing that they were thoroughly caught.

"Am I going to have to chastise you like a disappointed parent, is that what's going to have to happen?" Roxy asked, in a mixture of good humor and clear delineation. "Get back inside."

"Yes, Roxy." John mumbled, slipping back into the hallway and slinking back to their room, defeated thoroughly.

Then, two days later, they tried again, but at nighttime, in hopes that nobody would be around to stop their frolicking and exercising. Surely when the sun went down, anyone who cared would be long asleep - that was the thought process, of course.

"John?" Dave asked, one arm grabbing his hip, the other arm manipulating his long pipe. "John, what are you doing?"

"Uh." John stammered, cracking their head through the window to look back at Dave with all the shame possible in their body, knowing that they were thoroughly caught even in the dead of night. Dave's body was lit yellow by a small floating flame hovering above one of his free fingers, casting eerie shadows of his form across the alleyway walls, stretching and flickering with the light.

"John, why are you both up this late at night and also very clearly trying to sneak out of the bed rest you've so duly earned with your heroics?" Dave asked, bringing the light closer to his face so that John could see his very unamused expression cast in the flame's sickly glow. "Have your internal organs recovered fully from being perforated by my relative's blade?"

"Yes." John lied.

"So if we took you to the village physician tomorrow, and the village apothecarist, they'll both sign you with a clean bill of health, yeah?" Dave asked, very clearly not believing a word John said. He took a slightly derisive inhale of smoke from his pipe, blowing it gently across the flame on his finger, watching the particulate matter burn up into little sparks for his own amusement before turning back to the thinking John. "Yes?"

"I'll go back to bed." John mumbled, slipping back into the hallway and slinking back to their room, defeated thoroughly.

Then, on a normal day in the past month, John rested in their bed and did what little exercises they could from the comfort of a mattress without aggravating their injuries too much. Push-ups, but no sit-ups. Squats, but only a couple. Occasionally swinging the good ol' hammer around just to make sure they still knew how to use it. In between that and the evening, Roxy would bring them food; breakfast and lunch. That usually went something along the lines of this;

"Hey, Roxy, can I ask you a question?" John asked, accepting the bowl of stew, staring at its murky, brown-red innards and poking at potatoes inside it with a spoon until they fell apart.

"You just did." Roxy teased, leaning on John's nightstand until the process of leaning became tenuous, deciding to instead just sit on it. There, that was easier.

"I mean, like--" John started, before getting cut off.

"Yes, you can ask me a question, John, I'm teasing you." Roxy said, chuckling quietly under their breath.

"Oh, okay, sorry. Anyway, why do you keep giving me free food?" John asked, and every day the answer was slightly different.

"I owe Dave a blood debt but I don't want to pay it to him because he's annoying." They said the first time John asked.

"I think you're cute and you deserve it." They said the second time (John was fairly certain this one was a lie).

"I'm not, this is going into a tab and you will need to pay me back for it later." They said the fifth time (John had to beg and plead them to admit that this one was actually a joke, though).

"Because I want to." Eventually became the default when Roxy was too tired to continue saying silly things for John's amusement, and tired of obfuscating the truth. "Because I want to." was not exactly getting to the heart of the matter, but it wasn't a lie either, and between you and Roxy, they weren't certain that John's holy magic didn't include lie detection of some kind. Probably not, but these weren't risks most people wanted to take if they knew what the stakes were - and the stakes, at least to Roxy, were worth the conversation-ending, perhaps slightly duplicitous language. Low-grade, villager stakes when compared to the sort of things John and Dave had to go through, but stakes nonetheless.

"Because I want to.", and John would go,

"Oh, okay. Thanks!" And eat whatever it was that Roxy had made for them.

In the evenings, before and after dinner, John tried to learn things. If they couldn't stimulate their body, they could at the very least try to stimulate their mind in a way that didn't leave them screamingly bored. Dave would pop up with a new textbook each day, and although John could not read it, even with their fancy glasses, Dave could still read it to them. They passed through a myriad of subjects at a very basic level in this way; econimity, physical alchemies, mathematics, even penmanship. Unsurprisingly, John Egbert had practically no ability to write with a quill in any useful fashion. Not even to sign their name, which had taken the form of an elaborate, but shockingly consistent, scribble.

Then, more exercise. Pacing around the room, sometimes, in eternal circular loops to ensure they could get some leg exercise in, build up their stamina. It was hard those first two weeks, when John's organs hadn't yet knit themselves together again in the right way, and still difficult the latter two, but not to quite the same extent. John's lungs were damaged, despite how much they had deliberately avoided vices of burning leaf and smoldering herb, damaged by battle and recklessness. The other two puncture wounds nicked John's intestines, making eating a painful affair that they pushed through with a smile - it would behoove nobody to act like they were in pain when they ate, even if it was true. And, more notably, the scorch marks on their hands had yet to fade away completely, leaving deep, pallid scars across John's palm, both upper and lower.

Heavy, thick scarring that didn't impede with walking, but definitely impeded with everything else, holding a spoon, grabbing their hammer, pushing into a standing position from the bed. Every day, John said a prayer to the moons above and filled themselves with a little more healing magic, re-opening a small cut somewhere on their body that they'd have to patch back up, their bandages seeming to last forever. Trading off the long term injuries for short term, stinging pain, every time, always in private. What do you think Dave would do if he knew John was still using holy magic to heal themselves despite the risk? It would likely be an uncomfortable conversation, to say the least.

Then, after all of that… Well, then it was time for bed. Again and again.

Dave's days, on the other hand, were much more active, albeit fraught with worry. Wake up, enjoy a quick breakfast, and then go out to perform odd tasks for the idle populace of Alekhine caught up in their own little lives. Nobody mentioned the occurrence with Sister Strider, conspicuously not talking about it in a way that struck Dave as more suspicious than anything else, in a way that made his paranoia flare up at the worst of times. Always waiting for the moment when he was out chopping firewood for the inn to be rewarded with a free night's meal, and the new Brother Strider, the one that shared his Brother's eyes, would appear from the shadows and skewer him like food on a stick.

Occasionally, the bounty board became a means of income, but only on the small jobs he felt comfortable taking on alone - clearing out a giant rat infestation, scaring away some owlbear cubs from the orchard a village away, and so on. Nothing particularly remarkable - nothing worth going over in any exquisite, loving detail. He ate food when he was hungry, in fits and starts, snacking about, never committing to meals. In the evenings, when he wasn't training his body, or John's mind, he was hiding away somewhere in the village where people would never find him. Or, at least, where nobody who had never met him would find him.

"What do you want?" Karkat asked, looking up from his anvil only enough to pay attention to Dave entering before returning the full brunt of his idle glare to the hot metal in front of him. Each roaring hammer blow send sparks scattering across his apron and onto the floor, a flood of molten fire and slag that kept the smithy filled with heat. Each strike slowly drew out more and more of the tool, with what was once a bar of metal being pulled out into shape into a thin, narrow blade. Karkat worked on a small weighted platform, with a single strap for slipping his foot into, in order to reach the very noticeably human-sized anvil with his somewhat stumpy halfling legs and stay there.

"Oh, you know, I figured we could hang around each other as friends do, occasionally chat about the weather, enjoy each other's company, et cetera. It's late, but not so late as to fill me with the rapturous desire for the sweet embrace of my awful dreams, which I will gladly ramble about at length at even the slightest provocation." Dave replied, walking into Karkat's smithy like he owned the place, looking around with a mixture of awe and churlish, imp-like delight.

"Will you, now?" Karkat asked, not turning his body in the slightest to face Dave. "You don't seem like the type to want to talk about something as lofty and ill-conceived as your dreams."

"You were right, that was a joke." Dave replied.

"Great. Get out of my smithy." Karkat continued, without missing a beat.

"What, there's no room anymore for me to hang around a friend and read a book while they serenade my ears with the lovely sound of hammer striking metal? What is this world coming to if a man can't pester his adorable halfling friend incessantly through the night so neither one of them has to be alone?" Dave jeered, sitting on a conveniently placed wooden chair and opening up his textbook, pulling his visor up, and starting to read.

"I'm not adorable and if you call me that again I'm going to shove hot coals into your eyes." Karkat growled, not able to take too much of his attention away from the hot metal he was repeatedly smashing into shape. "And I actually happen to enjoy my solitude, thank-you-very-much."

"Oh, pish posh." Dave gabbed, mockingly flapping his fingers like he was playing with a hand puppet. "Everyone needs a friend."

"I've gotten by just _fine_ without, thank you! I have Ironhoof and my forge and that's all the friends I need." Karkat shouted, his voice lowering into a more solemn, even tone, lips pulled up into an uncomfortable snarl. His head snapped towards the footsteps at the door, irritated enough to consider yelling for a moment until he saw who the third person gracing his smithy with their presence was. "Ah. Evening, Jade. Your parts are in the crate by the door."

"Oh, you're willing to give her the time of day but not old Sir Strider?" Dave protested, licking his thumb and flipping over one of the pages.

"Is this lout bothering you?" Jade asked, bending down into a squat so she could grab the crate full of parts and heft it up into her hands, gently shaking it to test for its contents.

Karkat's eyes flicked back between Jade and Dave. "Yes." He answered, after 15 seconds of silence.

"Do you need me to threaten him to leave?" Jade asked, bringing the crate up to her shoulder so she could brace it against something, to make carrying it actually possible. "I can go grab my hand-cannon if you'd like."

"No, once I'm done polishing this blade I'll cut his throat with it." Karkat replied, leaving the fact that the sword would take several more hours to finish unsaid. Nobody else really acknowledged it in any way more than a raised eyebrow.

"Fair enough, suit yourself." Jade replied, leaving the smithy behind as she walked out the open door. It was so much easier to get parts when you lived in the same town as the part-maker - even if this adventuring thing didn't work out in the long term, it was, in Jade's eyes, a very smart decision to leave home and actually get out into the world where she didn't have to get new parts delivered. What was Jade doing with her days? Well, working, mostly, retiring to her bedroom and working and tinkering.

Yes, there was some running and jumping involved so she could stay brisk, and obviously the usual eating and occasional nip of drink beyond just water, but, unlike John or Dave, Jade was satisfied with the mundane realities of sitting in her bedroom and creating. Sketching out plans on vellum from the nearby general store, getting Karkat to forge and assemble intricate parts for her, putting them together into strange clockwork mechanisms, improving her craft. Her hand cannon now had a small little seeing glass at the top of it, days spent aiming at targets to teach her just where to scratch a small "X" into the lens to ensure it could be used to help aim.

Every once in a while, she helped Dave out with a job here and there. Always good to have a girl with a very small cannon shooting giant rats while you cut them in half - one less giant rat you had to deal with yourself.

The weeks passed. The dreams continued.


	22. Chapter 22

John took to their newfound freedom with the same gusto as a baby bird attempting and failing to fly out of the nest, immediately stumbling down the stairs and almost landing on their face in a somewhat amusing, if dangerous, effort to make it down to the inn's main room for lunchtime. There were still aches and pains, and John's right side burnt sometimes when they breathed a little bit too hard, just a little bit, but they could swing their hammer and vault over small objects, which was really all a squire needed. Grabbing hold of the bannister, their knuckles squeezed tight while their fingers squeezed even tighter, not wearing the gauntlets that would be providing much-needed stability to their grip. Only the graces of the gods and the force of friction prevented John from tumbling ass-over-head down the stairs, which they had been warned about several times, and yet here they were, spitting the gods in the eye in a flagrant attempt to take things quickly regardless of the physician's advice.

That is how John, clinging to dear life on the railing, ended up facing the wrong way around, back to the inn's dining room, one foot in the air, both hands gripping tightly. After about five seconds of anguished, startled wails, they managed to plant their foot back down onto the stairs and turned around, wiping sweat from their brow and taking much, much slower steps down the rest of the way. "Oi, tosspot Egbert! Hurry up!" Dave called from the largest table crammed in the corner of the room, close to the bounty board. John looked up at him with a playful scowl and delicately - extremely slowly - finished their little performance all the way down the stairs, to the floor.

"Glad to see you among the realm of the waking once more." Roxy teased, following up with "On your left," as they passed by John with arms full of food and drink, to pass out to eagerly paying customers.

"Well, it's not for lack of trying, now is it!" John yelled back at them, which was only responded to with a turn of the head and a wry little smile. John sighed and slowly dragged themselves through the midday crowd to Dave's table, where Jade and Karkat were both sitting, chatting over Jade's hand-cannon, pointing out small bits and bobs of it to each other with great gusto. "You said you had something to show me. Well, I'm here, finally, so why don't you go tell me what it is? Would be greatly appreciated."

"Someone's grumpy." Karkat quipped without turning his head away. John shot him a leering look before turning back towards Dave, who eagerly flicked a piece of parchment over to John, watching it slide and twist across the table like an earthworm. It did not land quite so close enough to John to be easily read, so they just reached out and grabbed it instead.

"CALLING ALL ADVENTURERS!" In large, ostentatious, forest green ink, scrawled across the top. "A Dungeon has formed inside the tower of an important court wizard. Your assistance is required to eradicate the monsters inside the dungeon and rescue the wizard and her assistants. 400 gold coins for your troubles." It read, making John's eyes bulge outwards from their sockets at the mind-boggling amount of currency being flaunted here. "100 of which will be up front. Please meet me by your local town square or other such person-gathering area, I will be moving from town to town."

Signed, at the bottom, in similar loopy text, "Lord Jacob Halley", and emblazoned with a dark green wax seal.

"Four _hundred_ coins?" John asked, incredulous, in absolute disbelief. Then, because they still didn't believe it for a second, a repetition; "Four _hundred_? From Lord Halley himself?"

Dave threw a thumb up towards John's shoulder, his fingernails pointing towards the ceiling, in a sort of "turn around and look for yourself" gesture. John turned around and proceeded to see nothing interesting outside of the normal dining room of the inn, with people of all stripes, sizes, and colors enjoying their light lunches before heading back to whatever work it was they were doing. "He's out by the big cannon."

"Incredible. How are we going to get there, you think? Will he provide us some horses?" John asked, glancing over the parchment with nervous glee. It wasn't exactly the money amount that excited them, although that was certainly a bit of a factor. No, what was really exciting was the implication here, of experienced adventuring parties, of a high cost indicating lots of danger to throw oneself head-first into with no care for your well-being. It was that sort of thing that excited John to the point of nervous shaking, their fingers twitching slightly while they rocked side to side in their chair in thought. "Or maybe we get an escort of mighty guardsmen from the Lord's estate? A cart of our very own?"

"That's awfully presumptuous of you." Jade quipped, without skipping a beat or looking up from her hand-cannon. "Who said we were accepting the offer?"

"I did! Because we are." John answered, grinning wide, bringing as many teeth to bare as they could humanly accomplish.

It was exceptionally unnerving to everyone at the table not named Jade, who caught a glance of John's distressing facial expression, raised an eyebrow, and simply said "Okay." before turning back to her hand cannon.

"That being said, I have reason to believe that Lord Halley will not be providing transportation, and that it will be a bit of a trip. So, Karkat and I were talking last night--" Dave began, only to be quickly cut off by John.

"Excuse me for interceding, but you two are on a first name basis now? _And_ you are around him at night, spending your evenings? When's the wedding?" John joked, little chuckles bubbling out through their teeth.

Karkat and Dave both glanced at each other for a moment before returning to their respective conversations. Dave pulled the visor on his helmet up so he could stare John in the eye, face completely, totally neutral. "John, Karkat and I have been courting now for about a week. As it turns out, those sharp little wolf-gnashers of his present no issues in--" Dave began, only to be interrupted again by Karkat punching him in the sides and, judging by the reaction, the way Dave's body contorted in response, also kicking him in the shins.

"You're a louse, David Strider." Karkat shot, before turning back to Jade, pointing at her scope attached to the top of her hand-cannon with the most inquisitive of looks he could possibly muster.

"He's quite a sweetheart when he's not threatening to kill you, which is always." Dave coughed out, before returning to the topic at hand. "Anyway. Karkat will provide transportation and help manage camp in exchange for an even cut of the lucre when we're finished, 25 now, the remaining 75 later. Y'know, if it turns out transportation isn't provided and we're going to need a way to move ourselves from point A to point B. Are you ready to have more fun in a cart with your three favorite people, Squire Egbert? It feels like it's been _ages_ since we've had silly discussions in a cart waiting to arrive at a place. Oh, how I miss those days."

"You say "silly discussions", I say "making friends". Potato, potato." John replied, waving a hand in front of their face dismissively.

"How are we feeling, everyone? More food? Anything for you, John?" Roxy asked, sweeping through the crowd to almost blink into existence next to Dave's table.

"I would like… as large of a quantity of potatoes as you are allowed to give me." John said, after a moment of calm, collected thought on the matter. "Literally, as many as the chef will allow you to take and fit on a plate. I will then proceed to eat all of them. Just, an absolutely gobsmacking amount of cooked potatoes - don't want to put in an order request and get a stacked plate full of raw potatoes because your chef was feeling a little funny business today." John rattled off, relishing the newfound opportunity for awe-inspiring amounts of food that their newest business proposition would allow them to pay for. "I will pay you back later today, after we're done meeting with Lord Halley and acquire our up-front payment."

"Oh, Lord Halley, huh? Is he here to post a bounty? Normally only see the guy when he's helping collect census." Roxy mused, committing John's order to thought. "Anything to drink? And don't you worry your pretty little face off, Mr. Boxcarts takes his cooking very seriously."

"Apple juice, if you have it. Also, what's census?" John asked, leaning into one of their palms, catching their chin with it and looking at Roxy. There was something about the way John's eyes idly traced over them that might express a certain level of infatuation, if one was willing to read into it in the proper fashion. Or maybe they were fascinated by another member of the same category as they were, someone who seemed to be trying to actively eschew the prior echoes of their clingy identity, the sort of platonic fascination that only camaraderie could provide in the sort of abundance seen in John's dark blue gaze. That, and the sparkle of new knowledge, the way John's face sort of scrunched up a little whenever they were about to learn something new - that was good, that was adding to their enjoyment of the little moment at the side of the table.

"It's basically when Lord Halley and his men go around and count all the people. Supposedly, it is important for him to know of everyone in his lands, their names, what they do for a living, their species and subspecies, but I think it's a load of hogwash." Dave answered, flicking out one hand derisively to express his distaste for the process, drawing John's eye back to him. While he did so, with his flashy, rapid gesticulations, Roxy took advantage of the distraction to vanish back into the crowd.

Jade looked up from her hand-cannon for a moment to comment; "Plus, I think out of all the people who have a reason for someone to want their existence hidden, I think you probably have the best one out of anyone I've met yet."

"Jade, how many people have you met--" Karkat began, fiddling with the scope that had been pulled off the top of Jade's hand-cannon and was now resting comfortably in his hands.

"Very few." Jade interrupted, sounding almost proud of the fact.

"...I was going to ask "who fit the criteria of "wanting their existence hidden"", but I suppose that number is by necessity even smaller." Karkat finishes, before returning to examining Jade's expertly constructed hand-cannon scope.

"What makes you say that?" Jade asked.

"Oh no." Dave mumbled.

"Oh no?" John asked Dave.

" _Maths_." Dave murmured, and John immediately understood.

"I mean, I suppose it does make intuitive sense that a group that contains individuals picked from a larger group can't, by definition, be larger than the original group, but how can we be assured of that?" Jade spoke, more at Karkat than with anyone actually in the conversation (Karkat included). "Sure, we can take many things for granted but without a logically consistent proof we are lost in this world! None of my texts have much information on such groupings yet - I wonder if this is a new field of inquiry?"

"Jade?" Karkat asked, raising an eyebrow, only to be immediately met with a finger smashed up against his lips. He flared them outwards, growling at Jade until she pulled her hand back and shushed him even harder.

"--a situation in which a subgroup contains more members than its parent group? I can't think of one off the top of my head but that doesn't necessarily mean it's impossible, particularly if we take real-life context out of the situation and work purely in a realm of abstracted mathematics. I suppose we should probably define this as such then, to see if a group can contain more members than a parent group or not. Or is it just an inherent property of child groupings to be unable to contain more than their parents, regardless of real world context or not?" Jade continued to aimlessly ramble, snatching Lord Halley's parchment out of John's hands, pulling a quill and small ink vial out of her apron like it was absolutely no big deal whatsoever, and beginning to scrawl symbols on the back of the bounty parchment.

"Jade! Dungeon! Lord Halley!" Dave interrupted after giving her a solid minute of uninterrupted sketch time, shocking Jade out of her reverie.

"Huh? Oh, right. What were we talking about?" Jade asked, and then immediately answered her own question. "Oh, right, yes, the group of people that I have met and also would like to hide their existence is a subgroup of the larger parent grouping of "people that I have met", which I would define as "people I know the names of" for the sake of simple and easy rigor. This subgroup consists of one person, named David E. Strider, who I believe is the only member that falls under its definitions. I also think out of all the people in the group--"

"The group of one person." Dave interjected.

"Yes, the group of a single person, I think Dave has the best reason for wanting to be unknown, with the whole "being chased by assassins" thing going on." Jade finally finished her long, drawn out thought, and then went back to sketching out her thoughts on the parchment.

"I imagine the fact that we're all still alive means nobody has seen hide nor hair of the two?" John asked.

Dave shrugged in response. "Believe me, I do, in fact, care for your safety, Squire Egbert - I would've alerted you if I had heard anything. No, as far as we're aware, they vanished that night a month ago and haven't been seen since."

"Probably nursing that nasty wound the boy was given courtesy of this marvel of modern day engineering." Karkat chirped, patting Jade's hand-cannon almost affectionately. "I'm proud to have landed a blow on the bastard by proxy, and I'm sure they don't have quite the same caliber of healing magic as Egbert here has access to."

"Assuredly not." John replied, pointing a thumb at themselves. "I'm simply the best there is."

"Debatable, but let's not go too far off on a tangent again, for the fifth time this entire conversation." Dave cut in. It was only about then that John noticed that Roxy had left at some point, and quietly wondered to themselves when that had happened. "This isn't going to be like that rinky-dink cellar we fought the ogre in. If the parchment is accurate, this is a wizard's tower, already a very magical place, getting absolutely soaked in danger sauce from top to bottom. It will be large, likely labyrinthine, almost certainly full of traps, and infested with monsters."

"You make it sound so appealing!" John squealed, grinning from ear to ear.

"I'm trying to make it sound unappealing, believe it or not. What I'm trying to say is that we do not have to take this job if you don't want to. Really, we're not even very experienced adventurers, and it's very likely this is over our heads and we could get injured, or worse. We were mostly just waiting for you to come down to make a decision." Dave explained, flicking his gaze towards Roxy as they arrived with a steaming plate stacked at least six inches high with a fairly preposterous mound of mashed potatoes, and a mug full of ale-colored apple juice.

"For you, Knight Egbert." Roxy crooned, curtseying politely.

"Thank you, Roxy!" John replied, and they threw them a wink before vanishing back into the crowd. "Man, they're so nice. Anyway, of course we're going! I'm not sure why you even bothered to have this silly little detour in the conversation."

"We could die, you know. That's something to consider." Karkat snarkily groaned. "I think I would prefer to avoid that, if at all possible."

John grinned just a little bit wider, using a fork to stuff an uncomfortable amount of mashed potatoes into their mouth before chewing and swallowing. "That sounds like a problem for future us."

"You going to share any of that?" Jade asked, pointing to John's plate of mash with a fork.

"Oh, yeah, sure, go ahead." John replied, pushing the plate a little closer to the middle of the table. "I suppose the faster we get done, the faster we can go see Lord Halley and accept his offer, yeah?"

Dave sighed, flipping his visor back down with a loud click. "Yeah, that's the bones of it."


	23. Chapter 23

The motley arrangement of two knights, a tinker, and an ornery blacksmith all exited the inn with food in their bellies and a distinct amount of spring in each individual's step. This ranged from John, who was practically bouncing into the sky with every tiny motion they made, all the way down to Karkat, who was doing his best impersonation of a quickly moving snail scuttling across the damp, late-fall-ish dirt-clay that compromised Alekhine's anchoring ground, only barely keeping pace with everyone else. It was a beautiful, sunny day, full of bouncy clouds in the sky performing their usual procession, the sun's light providing a warm, comfortable blanket over everyone outside.

And there was, in fact, everyone outside. It was not every day, as it were, that the local lord made an appearance in your little mountain town, carrying a full entourage in tow. There were bowmen stationed on every rooftop, making their presence clearly known, marked with dark green ribbons and the symbols of four intertwining circles emblazoned on their single pauldrons, a heavily armored single arm for holding the bow, and a less armored one for pulling the arrow. Horses, well-trained horses, head-to-toe covered in armor along with their riders, who were, if anything, slightly _less_ armored. Mostly leathers and chain mail, rather than the thick plates draped over their steeds. Two of them had lances carrying Lord Halley's four-ringed banner on them on a small flag attached near the head, while the rest carried long, sharp swords with large, lengthy grips and basket-like handles.

In the center of town, there was the unmistakable celestial body in which the rest of this clown show infinitely gyrated around, a figure of infinite repose and retort, surrounded by bodyguards on foot. Lord Halley stood at an impressive six foot something or other, with his height modulating depending on how much he was bending over in service to his bad back at one particular moment or another. He had the appearance about him of someone who was once very strong, perhaps even the strongest around, but age had been slowly biting away at, skin that stretched just a hair loosely around ex-muscles atrophied with age. That being said, it was also just as clear that not a single bit of youthful verve had left this man since his young adulthood, and he carried himself firm and stout, in practical leathers of his own rather than any sort of ostentatious robe. His outfit had a bit of fluff to it, a ruffle here and there, with a wide-brimmed hat keeping him coated in cooling shade, but on the whole he was almost unmistakable for any other member of his company unless you knew what you were looking for, or had half a brain and could understand context.

As John approached, it became easier to get a good look at his features. Wrinkles pulled onto tight, dark skin, making him appear somewhat leathery himself, an impressive scruff of facial hair about the color and texture of fine woven mesh, stiff and well-worked. His green eyes twinkled with a sense of almost childish wonder at everything he looked at, no matter how much sternness might've been a more appropriate facial expression for the situation, and his mustache was exquisite - easily the best John had ever seen, curling off of his face like the flexed arms of a strongman. The only oddity about him was his sword, a curved, familiar sort of blade, a handle wrapped and bound tightly in black leather, unlike the more brown tan hides of his armor, with a single edge. Everyone else in his escort with a sword had those of a distinctly Prospitan style, without exaggeration or strange forging processes, merely straight, heavy swords composed of well-forged metal.

As the group approached, a thin, wide blade with a flat tip emerged from the crowd, blocking their path at eye level. "Halt." Came a voice from one of Lord Halley's bodyguards. "State your purpose."

"Oh, pish-posh, Dirk!" Lord Halley called out excitedly, pressing the flat of his sword against the back of the bodyguard's until it was lowered down all the way into the dirt. "Look, we have a man in armor, a woman with strange devices, a halfling, and… Another individual! Clearly, this is an adventuring party heeding my call - what other kind of strange men and women would be wearing armor and brandishing weapons in public?"

"I believe all of your entourage also does this, sir." The bodyguard known as Dirk replied, sheathing his blade, adjusting the green ribbon tied around his neck loosely like a scarf. "Unless you are to suggest that they, too, are an adventuring party?"

Lord Halley rubbed his beard in thought, gleefully running his fingers through his wiry hair. "By Calliope, I daresay you're right, in a fashion! But no, my good fellow, I do believe these are _proper_ adventurers, adventurer's adventurers! The kind that slay dragons and apply heel to posterior! Committing epic feats worthy of the greatest poets! The kind that lay waste to ancient gods!"

"Erm, yes, I do believe we're something of the sort." John cut in, nervously rubbing the back of their head as Lord Halley sheathed his blade and reached out with one wrinkled hand.

"Oh, my sincerest apologies, good chum! I just get so excited about these things - you know how it is, I would hope?" He asked, clasping John's hand in his own when his handshake was reciprocated and giving it a startlingly strong, rough shake or two. The initial impression of him as past his prime was perhaps one given not entirely correctly, as nothing was more clear to John now that in a fight between them and this sixty, seventy year old man, not only would the older man win but he would win handily. John nervously looked around for advice, only able to feel the burning gazes of their accomplices behind them, and the much cooler, more collected gaze of the bodyguard named Dirk staring back at them. "We've already sent in two adventuring parties to attempt to rescue my court wizard, but have not heard hide nor hair of them since a month ago! Oh… where are my manners?"

"Where indeed, sir." Dirk chimed in, prompting a loud roar of overeager laughter to spill out freely from Lord Halley's lips like water bursting a dam and pouring down a waterfall.

"Where indeed! My name is Lord Jacob Halley! It's a pleasure to meet you all, do you mind introducing yourselves and then we can talk about your assignment in more considerable detail?" He asked, finally letting go of John's hand and letting his own retract to his side, idly petting his beard like it was some kind of family animal that required constant attention. For once, John was almost stunned silence, approached by someone whose general zest for life outpaced their own, so when their introduction wasn't forthcoming, Dave muscled past them and reached a gauntlet'd hand out to clasp Lord Halley's.

"David E. Strider, my liege. Knight-errant and monster slayer. I lead this party." He announced confidently, causing John and Jade to both glance at each other with an eyebrow mutually raised, but saying nothing more.

Lord Halley clasped both of his hands around Dave's, shaking it even harder than he did with John's. "A pleasure, a pleasure! Do you hear that, Dirk? Another Strider! Are you two related, perchance?"

And then, the air grew _frigid_. Dirk's gaze, his bright amber eyes, met the party and flashed with recognition, flicking to Jade's plainly visible hand-cannon, then to Dave's visor. Dave's body visibly tensed up, one hand slowly coming to rest on his sword hilt while the other one remained in Lord Halley's titan-like grip, no longer shaking ast. John's breath hitched up, and the scars on their burnt hand began to ache sympathetically at… something, although they didn't know what.

Dirk raised a hand slowly, as if to preemptively dismiss the hostilities. "It must be a coincidence, sir. I'm unaware of any relatives - I'm an orphan, as you know."

Dave followed shortly in kind. "I'm afraid the only other living Strider I was aware of is… no longer with us."

"Does he live elsewhere?" Lord Halley asked, keeping his grip tight. John and Jade both looked at each other again, visibly wincing and cringing up, while Karkat coughed twice after 10 seconds of uncomfortable silence.

"Sire, Monsieur Strider's relative has… passed away." Dirk informed him, and Lord Halley jumped up in genuine shock at the revelation that that was, in fact, what Dave meant.

"Oh, oh my! Sincerest apologies, may his memory be a blessing and all that. Perhaps you two are… distant cousins, then!" He continued, while Jade gave John a little bump in the elbow.

"Something tells me this man is not exactly used to carrying out normal conversations with us mortal men." Jade whispered, eliciting a quiet little chuckle from John.

"No, I don't think so either." John replied. By the time they turned their attention back to Lord Halley, Dave had stepped aside and Karkat had taken his place in the crowd, reaching a hand politely up towards the Lord.

"Karkat Vantas. I will not be participating directly in this venture, nevertheless, I feel it may be important for you to know of me - I will be transporting the louts, and I make better damn swords than every armorer you've ever met." Karkat shouted, drawing only the slightest amount of attention towards himself while Lord Halley bent down into a squat, just enough to shake Karkat's hand with one of his own.

"Yeoman!" Lord Halley shouted, even louder than Karkat, drawing the attention of a member of his entourage, turning to look at him like a startled rabbit. "Mark this name down! Vantas… what was the name of your smithery again?"

"Burnt Pyrope Sword & Nail." Karkat answered, which, for some reason, caught John slightly off guard. Wasn't the name of his smithy just… Vantas Blacksmiths, or something of the sort? John could've sworn it was…

"Burnt Pyrope, eh? Not… Vantas Blacksmiths? Vantas & Sons?" Lord Halley asked quietly, letting go of Karkat's hand and withdrawing his fingers into his lap. "Pyrope isn't your name."

"No, it isn't." Karkat non-answered to the non-question.

"Burnt Pyrope Sword & Nail! Communicate this to the requisition officer for our next order of fine blades!" Lord Halley yelled back to the still-startled yeoman, who immediately ducked away to carry out Lord Halley's strange whims. "I do hope you live to your word about making better swords than my armorers!"

"And what if I don't, and was merely bluffing you?" Karkat snipped, taking a couple of slow steps backward.

Lord Halley's face didn't change expression in the slightest. "Then I will burn your smithy down and ensure you never work in the industry again." He said, with a dissonantly serene smile. Then, it broke out into a wider, tittering grin. "Kidding, kidding! No need to look so severe, Karkat, my boy! I would never! We'll simply stop ordering from you. Nothing so homi _ci_ dal."

"Whew. You really got me going there, for a second." Karkat replied in a brusque monotone. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Jade, sensing impending disaster, instead bravely volunteered herself, shoving her hand excitedly into Lord Halley's own.

"Jade Harley, Mister Halley. It's a pleasure." She said, cutting off Karkat, who was about to, judging by the squinted up expression on his face, expel a direct stream of targeted invective on the local lord for threatening to burn down his life's work. She gently nudged Karkat with her ankle and he immediately bumped into her with his forehead, nearly making her buckle at the knees at the sudden headbutt, only barely keeping her balance. "Quit it, Karkat!"

Instead of responding in a coherent fashion, Karkat just angrily barked, baring his teeth at Jade and Lord Halley before slinking away. "I'll be by my cart if you need me."

"Oh, Calliope… I do hope he's not too mad at me?" Lord Halley murmured, watching Karkat stomp away into the crowd. "I only did mean to crack a small jest between friends."

"You did threaten to burn his life's work down." Both Dave and Dirk said at the same time, although Dirk slightly louder and closer to Lord Halley. They shared another glance at each other, each one furrowing their brow at the other before they just turned away.

"Do you think he took it personally…?" Lord Halley asked Dirk, ignoring Jade for the moment, sounding personally hurt by the possibility that someone might be mad at him. "I'll have to begin drafting him an apology letter as soon as we're finished here, posthaste!"

"That would be prudent, sir. In the meanwhile, your introductions?" Dirk reminded him, and when Lord Halley turned around to see Jade standing in front of him, he jumped up slightly with a startled yelp.

"Stars and garterbelts! My apologies!" Lord Halley responded, bowing profusely. He grabbed Jade's hand and gave it another rough shake, which she reciprocated in easy kind, roughly shaking his hand back. "What a grip on you, lass!"

"Thank you. Jade Harley. It's a pleasure to meet you, Mister Halley." She repeated. "I make small trinkets, including this hand-cannon. We will have to talk about it at some point."

"So we will!" Lord Halley responded with a voracious grin, slapping a hand onto Jade's shoulder. From this close, there was a sort of strange, unseemly aura surrounding the two of them, something that John couldn't quite put their fingers on, but the second they let go of each other's firm grips, that feeling subsided. "And you! Tell me about yourself, fine ma'am!"

"Just Egbert is fine if you need something formal. I'm not a ma'am." John replied, stepping forward out of the crowd to shake Lord Halley's hand again.

"Then tell me about yourself, Mister Egbert!" Lord Halley repeated.

"I'm not a mister, either." John corrected him.

With his free hand, Lord Halley rubbed at his chin in thought. "I will just call you Egbert, then! Egbert, like the paladin?" He asked, letting go of John's hand and kneeling down just a tiny bit, an inch or two, unlike the full squat he did to reach Karkat. "Another distant relation, like our two Striders?"

"No, actually, Father Egbert was my father. Not very distant at all." John murmured, just loud enough to be heard.

"Hmm. Shame to hear what happened to him. But I trust his abilities have been passed down into good hands! He really was one of the best." Lord Halley said, more speaking at John than to them, before turning to Dirk. "Dirk! Inform the yeoman that I've made my selection."

"Sir?" Dirk asked, raising an eyebrow. "I don't believe Egbert has finished their introduction."

"Oh, no, I don't need to know any more! We have a Strider, an Egbert, and…" He tapped his nose silently in thought. "Someone whose name is close enough to my own that I find it pleasing! And the sharpest sword-smith in the mountain range, his words, not mine. If their Strider is anything like my own, then I have one hundred percent confidence that these are the right individuals for the job."

"Huh?" "What?" "Yeah!" Dave, Jade, and John all said in unison - Dave and Jade mumbling it, and John shouting. "Thank you very much for the opportunity, Lord Halley - I promise, you won't regret this!"

"No, I'd better not." He said, grinning as he reached into a large purse-like pouch hanging off his hip. He popped it open, revealing several dozen stacks of coinage, wrapped up and tied with a neat little bow on eight edges, preventing them from slipping through, for the most part. Then, he handed out two of the coin rolls per person, one to John, who was closest, the other to Jade, and another still to Dave (with a second set given shortly and automatically thereafter, presumably to be given to Karkat). "Here is your up-front allowance."

"Huh?" Dave repeated, in disbelief. "No interview?"

"Consider this the interview, my friends. Return here in three hours after enjoying your fill and we can discuss our plans in more detail." Lord Halley instructed, his grin turning to a smirk and from there into a neutral, monotone chop. "How does that sound?"

"Infinitely generous, Lord Halley!" Jade shouted, drawing his attention with a wide grin forming once more. "We look forward to our discussion."

"As do I." Lord Halley responded, his grin returning once again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. All views, kudos, comments, and bookmarks are appreciated.  
> [Twitter](https://twitter.com/classpectanon)


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